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STUDIES IN THE 
ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 



WORKS BY ARTHUR SYMONS 

Cities {Illustrated) 

Cities of Italy 

Introduction to tbe Study of Browniug 

{New Edition) 
Plays, Acting and Music 
The Romantic Movement in English Poetry 
Spiritual Adventures 
Studies in Prose and Verse 
Studies in Seven Arts 
William Blake 
Figures of Several Centuries 
Colour Studies In Paris {Illustrated) 
The Symbolist Movement in Literature 

{Revised and Enlarged Edition) 
Studies in the Elizabethan Drama 

E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



STUDIES IN THE 
ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 



BY 

ARTHUR SYMONS 

AUTHOR OF 

Cities of Italy," " Plays, Acting and Music, 

"The Romantic Movement in English Poetry,". 

"Studies in Seven Arts," "Colour Studies 

IN Paris," "The Symbolist Movement 

in Literature," etc., etc. 




NEW YORK 
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

681 Fifth Avenue 



Copyright, 1919, by 
E. P. DUTTON & CO. 



All Bights Reserved 




Printed in the United States of America 



M iQim 



^.CU52925l 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTKB PAQB 

I. Antony and Cleopatra .... 1 

II. Macbeth 21 

III. Twelfth Night 35 

IV. Measure for Measure .... 44 

V. The Winter's Tale 53 

VI. Titus Andronicus and the Tragedy 

OF Blood 61 

VII. The Question of Henry VIII . . 88 

VIII. Romeo and Juliet 117 

IX. Cymeeline 132 

X. Troilus and Cressida .... 147 

XI. Philip Massinger 161 

XII. John Day 195 

XIII. Middleton and Rowley .... 211 



STUDIES IN THE 
ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 



STUDIES IN 
THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 



I. ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 

Antony and Cleopatra is the most wonder- 
ful, I think, of all Shakespeare's plays, and 
it is so mainly because the figure of Cleo- 
patra is the most wonderful of Shakespeare's 
women. And not of Shakespeare's women 
only, but perhaps the most wonderful of 
women. The queen who ends the dynasty 
of the Ptolemies has been the star of poets, 
a malign star shedding baleful light, from 
Horace and Propertius down to Victor Hugo; 
and it is not to poets only that her name has 
come to be synonymous with all that one can 
conceive of the subtlety of beauty. Before 
the thought of Cleopatra every man is an 
Antony, Shakespeare no less than another, 
though in the play he holds the balance quite 



2 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

steadily. The very name calls up everything 
that one has read or thought or known of 
" the world well lost," the giving up of all for 
love, the supreme surrender into the hands of 
Lilith, and the inevitable penalty. Probably 
Shakespeare had had his Cleopatra, though, 
fortunately for us and for him, he stopped 
short of the choice of Antony, when 

Entre elle et I'univers qui s'offraient a la fois 
II h^sita, lachant le monde dans son choix. 

But unless we adopt the surely untenable 
theory that the Sonnets, with their passionate 
sincerity of utterance, the curiously individual 
note of their complex harmonies, are merely 
passion according to the Italian Opera, is it 
not possible that the dark woman, the " woman 
coloured ill," of whom they show us such 
significant hints of outline, may have turned 
his thoughts in the direction of Plutarch's 
story of Antony and Cleopatra? It is possible; 
and if so, Shakespeare must have felt a 
singular satisfaction in putting thus to use an 
experience bought so sorrowfully, with so 
much ''expense of spirit;" must have felt that 
he was repaid, more than repaid. 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 3 

In the conduct of this play, dealing with so 
typical a story of passion, and with lovers so 
unrestrained, it is curious to note how much 
there is of restraint, of coolness, how carefully 
the style everywhere is heightened, and how 
much of gravity, in the scenes of political 
moment, comes to hinder us from any sense 
of surfeit in those scenes, the central ones of 
action and interest, in which the heady pas- 
sion of Cleopatra spends itself. Never was 
a play fuller of contrasts, of romantic elements, 
of variety. The stage is turbulent with move- 
ment; messengers come and go incessantly, 
troops are passing over, engaging, and now in 
flight; the scene shifts, carrying us backward 
and forward with a surprising rapidity. But 
one has a feeling that contrast is of the essence 
of the piece, and that surprise is to be expected ; 
and not even the variety of the play is more 
evident than its perfect congruity. Some of 
this comes about, there can be little question, 
from the way in which Shakespeare has con- 
structed his play on the very lines of Plutarch, 
following his authority with a scrupulousness 
not unlike that of a modern Realist for his 
" human documents," and no doubt for the 



4 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

same reason. Plutarch was, for Shakespeare, 
the repository of actual fact; in those pages he 
found the liveliest image attainable of things 
as they really happened, and in the comments, 
outlining the characters, something far more 
likely to be right than the hazard of any guess 
of his, so long after. And so fully aware 
was he of the priceless value of every hint 
art can extort from nature, of the priceless 
value of all we can get of real nature, that he 
was content here to copy merely, to recon- 
struct after a given plan, and almost without 
altering a single outline. He gave the outlines 
life, that was all; and it is a real Antony, a 
real Cleopatra, that come before us on the 
romantic stage. 

While the main interest of the play is of 
course centred in the personages who give it 
name, Shakespeare has not here adopted the 
device, used in Macbeth, for instance, of care- 
fully subordinating all the other characters, 
leaving the two principal ones under a strong 
light, and in a salient isolation. He has rather 
developed these characters through the me- 
dium of a crowd of persons and incidents, 
giving us, not a small corner of existence 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 5 

burningly alive with tremendous issues, but a 
lover's tragic comedy played out in the sight 
of the world, on an eminence, and with the 
fate of nations depending upon it; a tragic 
comedy in whose fortunes the arrival of a 
messenger may make a difference, and whose 
scenes are timed by interviews with generals 
and rulers. It is the eternal tragedy of love 
and ambition, and here, for once, it is the love 
which holds by the baser nature of the man 
who is the subject of it, the ambition which 
is really the prompting of his nobler side. 
Thus the power of Cleopatra is never more 
really visible than in the scenes in which she 
does not appear, and in which Antony seems 
to have forgotten her. For by the tremendous 
influences which in these scenes are felt to 
be drawing him away from her, by all that we 
see and hear of the incitements to heroic 
action and manly life, we can measure the force 
of that magic which brings him back always; 
from Csesar, who might be a friend, from 
Octavia, who would be a wife, from Pompey, 
a rival; to her feet. Such scenes are, besides, 
a running comment of moral interpretation, 
and impress upon us a sane and weighty 



6 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

criticism of that flushed and feverish existence, 
with what is certainly so tempting in it, 
which is being led by these imperial lovers on 
terms of such absolute abandonment of every- 
thing to the claims of love. This criticism 
is singularly definite, leaving us in no doubt 
as to the moral Shakespeare intended to draw, 
a moral still further emphasized by the reti- 
cent quietude of Octavia, the counterpoise to 
Cleopatra; a character of delicate invention, 
surprising us by the precise and attractive 
image she leaves upon a play where she is 
mainly silent. The ambiguous character of 
Enobarbus is still further useful in giving the 
point of irony which appears in all really true 
and fine studies of a world in which irony 
seems, after all, to be the final word with the 
disinterested observer. Enobarbus acts the 
part of chorus. He is neither for nor against 
virtue; and by seeming to confound moral 
judgments he serves the part of artistic 
equity. 

" Antonius being thus inclined, the last and 
extremest mischief of all other (to wit, the love 
of Cleopatra) lighted upon him, who did waken 
and stir up many vices yet hidden in him, 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 7 

and were never seen of any: and if any spark 
of goodness or hope of rising were left him, 
Cleopatra quenched it straight, and made it 
worse than before." So Plutarch, in the pic- 
turesque version of Sir Thomas North, 
'' Shakespeare's Plutarch," gives the first 
distinct sign of the finally downward course 
of Antony. Of Antony as he had been, we 
read a little above: " Howbeit he was of 
such a strong nature, that by patience he would 
overcome any adversity: and the heavier 
fortune lay upon him, the more constant 
showed he himself." When the play opens, 
this Antony of the past is past indeed; the 
first words strike the keynote: ''Nay, but this 
dotage of our general's." Yet in the character 
as it comes before us, one finds, broken indeed 
yet there though in ruins, the potent nature of 
the man, standing out now and again suddenly, 
though with but little result in action. See, 
for example, in the second scene, the scarcely 
perceptible flash, in the jesting colloquy 
with Enobarbus: "No more light words!" 
and the sudden change which comes about„ 
He can still, when Antony is Antony, com- 
mand. And observe again, in the meeting 



8 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

between the jarring triumvirs, how gravely 
and well he holds his own, and especially that 
scrupulous care of his honour, evidently so 
dear to him, and by no means a matter of 
words only. But the man, as we see him, 
is wrecked; he has given himself wholly over 
into the hands of a woman, '' being so ravished 
and enchanted of the sweet poison of her love, 
that he had no other thought but of her." 
It is in studying Cleopatra that we shall best 
see all that is important for us to see of Antony. 
In the short scene which serves for prelude 
to the play, we get a significant glimpse of 
the kind of power wielded by Cleopatra, and 
the manner in which she wields it. We see 
her taming with an inflection of frivolous 
irony the man who has conquered kingdoms; 
and we see, too, the unerring and very femi- 
nine skill, the finesse of light words veiling a 
strong purpose, by which she works the 
charm. From the second scene we perceive 
something of the tremors incident to a con- 
quest held on such terms: the fear of that 
" Roman thought " which has taken Antony, 
the little touch of anxiety at his leaving her 
for a moment. So long as the man is in her 



ANTONY AND CLEPOATRA 9 

presence she knows he is safe. But she has 
always to dread the hour of departure. And 
now Antony is going. She plays her spells 
admirably, but with a knowledge that they 
will be for once in vain. Her tongue still 
bites with the scourge of Fulvia: "What 
says the married woman?" the sneer, a little 
bitter to say, which comes from a conscious- 
ness of the something after all worth having 
in mere virtue, turned desperately into a 
form of angry and contemptuous mockery, 
Antony is not yet dead to honour; he feels 
his strength, feels that he can break away 
from the enchantress, as Tannhauser breaks 
away from Venus. But Cleopatra knows 
well that, like Tannhauser, her lover must 
come back and be hers for ever. 

One sees from the scene which follows how 
deeply Cleopatra loves, not alone her con- 
quest, but her lover. Hers is a real passion, 
the passion of a woman whose Greek blood 
is heated by the suns of Egypt, who knows, 
too, how much greater is the intoxication of 
loving than of being loved. There is a pas- 
sage in one of the Lettres Portugaises, and no 
passage in that little golden book is more 



10 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

subtly true, in which the " learned nun/' so 
learned in the ways of love, pities her incon- 
stant lover for the " infinite pleasures he has 
lost " if he has never really loved her. '' Ah, 
if you had known them," she says, '' vous 
auriez ^prouve qu'on est beaucoup plus heu- 
reux, et qu'on sent quelque chose de bien 
plus touchant quand on aime violenunent 
que lorsqu'on est aime." Cleopatra knew 
this as she knew everything belonging to the 
art of which she was mistress. '' Us who trade 
in love," she speaks of frankly, but with per- 
fect self-knowledge; a saying, however, which 
does her injustice if it leads us to confound her 
with the Manon Lescauts, exquisite, faithless 
creatures who keep for their lovers an entirely 
serviceable kind of affection, changing a lover 
for a calculated advantage. Love is a " trade " 
in which she never calculates; wily by nature, 
and as a loving woman is wily who has to 
humour her lover, she follows her blood, fol- 
lows it to distraction, and her fits and starts 
are not alone played for a purpose, before 
Antony, but are native to her, and break out 
with the same violence before her women. 
She is a woman who must have a lover, but 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 11 

she is satisfied with one, with one at a time; 
and in Antony she finds her ideal, whom she 
can call, in her pride, and truly: 

The demi-Atlas of this earth, the arm 
And burgonet of men. 

And she loves him with passion real of its kind, 
an intense, an exacting, an oppressive and over- 
whelming passion, wholly of the senses and 
wholly selfish: the love which requires pos- 
session, and to absorb the loved one. Before 
Antony she is never demonstrative: " the way 
to lose him!" She knows that a man like 
Antony is not to be taken with snares of mere 
sweetness, that neither for her beauty nor for 
her love would he love her continuously. 
She knows how to interest him, to be to him 
everything he would have in woman, to 
change with or before every mood of his as it 
changes. And this is her secret, as it is the 
secret of success in her kind of love. " So 
sweet was her company and conversation that 
a man could not possibly but be taken," we 
read in Plutarch. And Shakespeare has ex- 
pressed it monumentally in the lines which 
bring the whole woman before us: 



12 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

Age cannot wither her nor custom stale 
Her infinite variety: other women cloy 
The appetite they feed; but she makes hungry 
Where most she satisfies: for vilest things 
Become themselves in her. 

In the fifth scene of the second act we have 
what is perhaps the most wonderful revelation 
that literature gives us of the essentially 
feminine; not necessarily of woman in the 
general, but of that which radically, in looking 
at human nature, seems to differentiate the 
woman from the man. It is a scene with the 
infinite variety of Cleopatra: it is as miracu- 
lous as she: it proves to us that the woman 
who was "cunning past man's thought" 
could not be cunning past the thought of 
Shakespeare. We realize from this scene, 
more clearly than from anything else in the 
play, the boundless empire of her caprice, the 
incalculable instability of her moods, and how 
natural to her, how entirely instinctive, is 
the spirit of change and movement by which, 
partly, she fascinates her lover. The scene 
brings out the tiger element in her, the union, 
which we find so often, of cruelty with volup- 
tuousness. It shows us, too, that even in 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 13 

the most violent shock of real emotion she 
never quite loses the consciousness of self, that 
she cannot be quite simple. Even at the 
moment when the blow strikes her, the news 
of the marriage with Octavia, she has still the 
posing instinct: "I am pale, Charmian!" 
Then what a world of meaning, how subtle 
a touch of insight into the secrets of the hearts 
of women, there is in that avowal: 

In praising Antony, I have dispraised Caesar. 

I am paid for 't now. 

But when at last, exhausted by the violence 
of her battling and uncontrollable emotions, 
she surprises us by those humble words, so 
full of real pathos: 

Pity me, Charmian, 
But do not speak to me; 

one becomes aware of how deeply the blow has 
struck, how much there is in her to feel such a 
blow. Certainly, in this as in everything, she 
can never be quite simple. There is wounded 
vanity as well as wounded love in her cry. 
But it is the proudest as well as the most 
pitiless of women who asks for pity; and one 
can refuse her nothing, not even that. 



14 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

It is significant of the magic charm of the 
"queen, whom everything becomes," and of 
the magic of Shakespeare's art, that she 
fascinates us even in her weakness, dominating 
derision, and winning an extorted admira- 
tion from the very borders of contempt. In 
the scene which follows the flight from Actium, 
Shakespeare puts forth his full power. There 
are few more effective groupings than this of 
Cleopatra sitting silent over against Antony, 
neither daring to approach the other; he, 
crushed into an unspeakable shame which 
can never be redeemed; she, incapable of 
shame, but seeing it in the eyes of Antony, 
and conscious that she has done him a deed 
which can never be forgiven. She is here, as 
ever, cunning. Excuses can but be useless, 
and she attempts none, none but the faintest 
murmur: 

I never thought 
You would have followed! 

It is a mere broken sob of " Pardon, pardon!'* 
The tears are at hand, tears being with her the 
last weapon of all her armoury. They cannot 
but conquer, and the lover, who has given the 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 15 

world for love, says, not without the saddest 
of irony, as he takes her kiss: " Even this 
repays me." 

It is in the recoil from a reconciliation felt 
to be ignoble that Antony bursts out into such 
coarse and furious abuse, the first really angry 
reproaches he has addressed to her, at the 
mere sight of Caesar's messenger kissing her 
hand. Despair and self-reproach have pricked 
him into a state of smarting sensitiveness. 
One sees that, as Enobarbus says, " valour 
preys on reason"; he is "frighted out of 
fear." Well may Csesar exclaim: " Poor 
Antony!" Is there really a cause for his sus- 
picion of Cleopatra? Did she really betray 
him to Csesar? Plutarch is silent, and Shake- 
speare seems intentionally to leave it a little 
vague. But I think the suspicion wrongs 
her. Merely on the ground of worldly pru- 
dence she had more to hope from Antony than 
from Csesar. And there is nothing in all she 
says to Antony which comes with a more 
genuine sound than that reproachful question: 
"Not know me yet?" and then, "Ah, dear, 
if I be so!" 

I have said that Cleopatra has the instinct 



16 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

of posing. But in Antony, too, there is almost 
always something showy, an element of some- 
what theatrical sentiment. Now, preparing 
for his last battle, and really moved himself, 
he cannot help posturing a little before his 
servants, exerting himself to win their tears. 
It is not a simple leave-taking; it comes as if 
prepared beforehand. And next morning, how 
stagily, and yet with what a real exhilaration 
of spirits, does he arm himself and go forth, 
going forth gallantly, indeed, as Cleopatra 
says of him! Experience has taught him so 
little that he thinks even now that he may 
conquer. It has been so much his habit, as it 
has been Cleopatra's (caught perhaps from her) 
to believe what he pleases! His treatment of 
Enobarbus shows him still capable of a gener- 
ous act; a little ostentatious, as it may per- 
haps be. And the effect of that generous and 
forbearing tolerance shows that his fascination 
has not left him even in his evil fortune. He 
can still conquer hearts. And Cleopatra's? 
His, certainly, is still hers; and when, raging 
against the woman who has wrought all his 
miseries, he learns the news of her pretended 
death, it is with words full of the quiet of 



ANTONY AND CLEPOATRA 17 

despair that he takes the blow which releases 
him: 

Unarm me, Eros; the long day's task is done, 
And we must sleep. 

Love, as it does always when death has freed 
us from what we had felt to be a burden, 
returns; and he stabs himself with the sole 
thought of rejoining her. When, this side of 
the grave, he does rejoin her, not a syllable of 
regret or reproach falls from his lips. In the 
presence of death he becomes gentle: the 
true sweetness of the man's nature, long 
poisoned, comes back again at last. Nothing 
now is left him but his love for Cleopatra, love 
refined to an oblivious tenderness; that, and 
the thought that death is upon him, and that 
he falls not ignobly: 

a Roman by a Roman 
Valiantly vanquished. 

And so the fourth act ends on the magnificent 
words of Cleopatra over the dead body of 
the lord of the world and of her. The thought 
and the spectacle of death, of such a death, 
call out in her a far-thoughted reflection on 
the blindness of Fate, the general hazard of 
the world's course, with a vivid sense of the 



18 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

emptiness of all for which one takes thought. 
Death takes Antony as a mean man is taken; 
her, too, he leaves unqueened, a mere woman 
who has lost her lover. Then " all's but 
nought," the world is left poor, the light of 
it gone out; and it is with real sincerity, with 
a feeling of overwhelming disaster now irre- 
trievably upon her, that she looks to " the 
briefest end." 

In her last days Cleopatra touches a certain 
elevation: the thought of the death she pre- 
pares for herself intoxicates (while it still 
frights) her reason. It gives her still a 
triumphant sense of her mastery over even 
Csesar, whom she will conquer by eluding; 
over even Destiny, from which she will escape 
by the way of death. After all, the keenest in- 
citement to her choice comes from the thought 
of being led in triumph to Rome ; of appearing 
there, little and conquered, before Octavia. 
She has lived a queen; in all her fortunes there 
has been, as she conceived it, no dishonour. 
She will die now, she would die a thousand 
times, rather than live to be a mockery and 
a scorn in men's mouths. How significant is 
her ceaseless and panging remembrance of 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 19 

Octavia! a touch of almost petty spite, the 
spite of a jealous woman. Petty, too (but, 
inexhaustible as she is in resources, turned, 
with the frank audacity of genius, into a final 
triumph) is the keeping back of the treasures. 
But craft is as natural to her as breath. It is 
by craft that she is to attain her end of dying. 
The means of that attainment, a poor man 
bringing death in his basket of figs, the very 
homeliness of the fact, comes with an added 
effect of irony in the passing of this imperial 
creature. She is a woman to the last, and it 
is in no heroic frame of mind that she com- 
mends the easiness of the death by which she 
is to die. Yet, too, all her greatness gathers 
itself, her love of Antony (the one thing that 
had ever been real and steadfast in the deadly 
quicksand of her mind) her pride and her 
tenderness, and, at the last, her resolution. 

I am fire and air; my other elements 
I give to baser life. 

So she dies, undisfigured in death, the signs of 
death barely perceptible, lying 

As she would catch another Antony 
In her strong toil of grace. 



20 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

And the play ends with a touch of grave pity 
over "a pair so famous," cut off after a Ufe so 
full of glory and of dishonour, and taking with 
them, in their passing out of it, so much of the 
warmth and colour of the world. 

1889. 



II. MACBETH 

Of all Shakespeare's tragedies, Macbeth is 
the simplest in outline, the swiftest in action. 
After the witches' prelude, the first scene 
brings us at once into the centre of stormy 
interest, and in Macbeth's first words an am- 
biguous note prepares us for strange things to 
come. Thence to the end there is no turning 
aside in the increasing speed of events. 
Thought jumps to action, action is overtaken 
by consequence, with a precipitate haste, as 
if it were all written breathlessly. And in the 
style (always the style of Shakespeare's matu- 
rity) there is a hurry, and impatient condensa- 
tion, metaphor running into metaphor, thought 
on the heels of thought, which gives (apart 
from the undoubted corruption of the text as 
it comes to us) something abrupt, difficult, 
violent, to the language of even unimportant 
characters, messengers or soldiers. Thus, the 
play has several of those memorable condensa- 
tions of a great matter into a little compass, of 

21 



22 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

which Macduff's ''He has no children!" is per- 
haps the most famous in literature; together 
with less than usual of mere comment on life. 
If here and there a philosophical thought meets 
us, it is the outcry of sensation (as in the mag- 
nificent words which sum up the vanity of life 
in the remembrance of the dusty ending) 
rather than a reflection, in any true sense of 
the word. Of pathos, even, there is, on the 
whole, not much. In that scene from which 
I have just quoted the crowning words, there 
is, I think, a note of pathos beyond which 
language cannot go; and in the scene which 
leads up to it, a scene full of the most 
delicate humour, the humour born of the 
unconscious nearness of things pitiful, there 
is something truly pathetic, a pathos which 
clings about all Shakespeare's portraits of 
children. But elsewhere, even in places 
where we might expect it, there is but little 
sign of a quality with which it was not in 
Shakespeare's plan to lighten the terror or 
soften the hardness of the impression one re- 
ceives from this sombre play. Terror: that 
was the effect at which he seems to have aimed ; 
terror standing out vividly against a back- 



MACBETH 23 

ground of obscure and yet more dreadful mys- 
tery. The "root of horror," from which the 
whole thing grows, has been planted, one be- 
comes aware, in hell: do the supernatural 
solicitings merely foreshow, or do they really 
instigate, the deeds to which they bear wit- 
ness? Omens blacken every page. An ''Old 
Man" is brought into the play for no other 
purpose than to become the appropriate mouth- 
piece of the popular sense of the strange dis- 
turbance in the order of nature. Macbeth 
is the prey to superstition, and it seems really 
as if a hand other than his own forces him for- 
ward on the road to destruction. In no other 
play of Shakespeare's, not even in Hamlet, is 
the power of spiritual agencies so present with 
us; nowhere is Fate so visibly the handmaid 
or the mistress of Retribution. In such a play 
it is no wonder that pathos is swallowed up in 
terror, and that the only really frank aban- 
donment to humour is in an interlude of ghastly 
pleasantry, the Shakespearean authorship of 
which has been doubted. 

In this brief and rapid play, where the 
action has so little that is superfluous, and all is 
ordered with so rigid a concentration, the in- 



24 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

terest is still further narrowed and intensified 
by being directed almost wholly upon two 
persons. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth fill the 
stage. In painting them Shakespeare has 
expended his full power. Lie has cared to do 
no more than sketch the other characters. As 
in one of Michelangelo's sketches, the few 
lines of the drawing call up a face as truly 
lifelike as that which fronts us in the com- 
pleted picture. But in the play these subor- 
dinate figures are forgotten in the absorbing 
interest of the two primary ones. The real 
conflict, out of which the action grows, is the 
conflict between the worse and better natures 
of these two persons; the real tragedy is one 
of conscience, and the murder of Duncan, the 
assassination of Banquo, the slaughters with 
which the play is studded, are but the out- 
ward signs, the bloody signatures, of the ter- 
rible drama which is going on within. 

When Macbeth, returning victorious from' 
the field of battle, is met by the witches' pre- 
diction: "All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king 
hereafter!" is it not curious that his thoughts 
should turn with such astonishing promptitude 
to the idea of murder? The tinder, it is evi- 



MACBETH 25 

dent, is lying ready, and it needs but a spark 
to set the whole fire aflame. We learn from his 
wife's analysis of his character that he is am- 
bitious, discontented, willing to do wrong 
in order to attain to greatness, yet, like so 
many of the unsuccessful criminals, hampered 
always in the way of wrong-doing by an incon- 
venient afterthought of virtue. He has never 
enough of it to stay his hand from the deed, 
but he has just sufficient to sicken him of the 
crime when only half-way through it. He 
may plan and plot, but at the last he acts 
always on impulse, and is never able to pur- 
sue a deliberate course coolly. He knows him- 
self well enough to say, once: 

No boasting like a fool: 
This deed I'll do before the purpose cool. 

Before the purpose cool! that is always the 
danger to fear, in a nature of this unstable sort. 
He can murder Duncan, but he cannot bring 
himself to return and face his work, though his 
own safety depends upon it. It is the woman 
who goes back into the fatal chamber, to which 
he dares not return. No sooner has he done 
the deed than he wishes it undone. His con- 



26 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

science is awake now, awake and maundering. 
With the dawn courage returns; he is able to 
play his part with calmness, a new impulse 
having taken the place of the last one. Re- 
morse, for the present, is put aside. He plots 
Banquo's death deliberately, and is almost gay 
in hinting it to his wife. Now, his feeling 
seems to be, we shall be safe : no need for more 
crime! And then, perhaps, there will be no 
more of the "terrible dreams." 

When Banquo's ghost appears, Macbeth's 
acting breaks down. He is in the hold of a 
fresh sensation, and horror and astonishment 
overwhelm all. After having thought himself 
at last secure ! It is always through the super- 
stitious side of his nature that Macbeth is 
impressible. His agitation at the sight of the 
ghost of Banquo is not, I think, a trick of the 
imagination, but the horror of a man who sees 
the actual ghost of the man he has slain. Thus 
he cannot reason it away, as, before the fancied 
dagger (a heated brain conjuring up images 
of its own intents) he can exclaim: "There's 
no such thing!" The horror fastens deeply 
upon him, and he goes sullenly onward in the 
path of blood, seeing now that there is no re- 



MACBETH 27 

turning by a way so thronged with worse than 
memories. 

Since his initiate step in this path, Mac- 
beth has never been free from the mockery of 
desire to overcome his fears, to be at peace in 
evil-doing, to "sleep in spite of thunder." 
But his mind becomes more and more divided 
against itself, and the degradation of his 
nature goes on apace. When we see him 
finally at bay in his fortress, he is broken down 
by agitation, and the disturbance of all within 
and without, into a state of savage distraction, 
in which the individual sense of guilt seems to 
be lost in a sullen growth of moody distrust 
and of somewhat aimless ferocity. He is in 
that state in which ''the grasshopper is a bur- 
den," and every event presents itself as an 
unbearable irritation. His nerves are un- 
strung; he bursts out into precipitate and 
causeless anger at the mere sight of the mes- 
senger who enters to him. One sees his mental 
and bodily collapse in the impossibility of con- 
trolling the least whim. He calls for his 
armour, has it put on, pulls it off, bids it be 
brought after him. He talks to the doctor 
about the affairs of war, and plays grimly on 



28 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

medical terms. He dares now to confess to 
himself how weary he is of everything beneath 
the sun, and seeks in vain for what may "min- 
ister to a mind diseased." When, on a cry of 
women from within, he learns that his wife is 
dead, he can speak no word of regret. ''She 
should have died hereafter;" that is all, and a 
moralization. He has "supped full with hor- 
rors," and the taste of them has begun to pall. 
There remains now only the release of death. 
As prophecy after prophecy comes to its ful- 
filment, and the last hope is lost, desperation 
takes the place of confidence. When finally, 
he sees the man before him by whom he knows 
that he is to die, his soldier's courage rises at a 
taunt, and he fights to the end. 

Nothing in his life 
Became him like the leaving it. 

The " note," as it may be called, of Macbeth 
is the weakness of a bold mind, a vigorous 
body; that of Lady Macbeth is the strength 
of a finely-strung but perfectly determined 
nature. She dominates her husband by the 
persistence of an irresistible will; she herself, 
her woman's weakness, is alike dominated 



MACBETH 29' 

by the same compelling force. Let the effect 
on her of the witches' prediction be contrasted 
with the effect on Macbeth. In Macbeth 
there is a mental conflict, an attempt, however 
feeble, to make a stand against the temp- 
tation. But the prayer of his wife is not for 
power to resist, but for power to carry out, the 
deed. The same ambitions that were slumber- 
ing in him are in her stirred by the same spark 
into life. The flame runs through her and pos- 
sesses her in an instant, and from the thought 
to its realization is but a step. Like all 
women, she is practical, swift from starting- 
point to goal, imperious in disregard of hin- 
drances that may lie in the way. But she is 
resolute, also, with a determination which 
knows no limits; imaginative, too (imagina- 
tion being to her in the place of virtue) and it 
is this she fears, and it is this that wrecks her. 
Her prayer to the spirits that tend on mortal 
thoughts shows by no means a mind steeled 
to compunction. Why should she cry: 

Stop up the access and passage to remorse! 

if hers were a mind in which no visitings of pity 
had to be dreaded? Her language is fervid. 



30 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

sensitive, and betrays with her first words the 
imagination which is her capacity for suffer- 
ing. She is a woman who can be '' magnifi- 
cent in sin," but who has none of the callous- 
ness which makes the comfort of the criminal; 
not one of the poisonous women of the Renais- 
sance, who smiled complacently after an assas- 
sination, but a woman of the North, in whom 
sin is its own " first revenge." She can do the 
deed, and she can do it triumphantly; she can 
even think her prayer has been answered; 
but the horror of the thing will change her 
soul, and at night, when the will, that sup- 
ported her indomitable mind by day, slumbers 
with the overtaxed body, her imagination 
(the soul she has in her for her torture) will 
awake and cry at last aloud. On the night 
of the murder it is Macbeth who falters; it 
is he who wishes that the deed might be un- 
done, she who says to him 

These deeds must not be thought 
After these ways; so, it will make us mad; 

but to Macbeth (despite the "terrible dreams") 
time dulls the remembrance from its first 
intensity; he has not the fineness of nature 



MACBETH 31 

that gives the power of suffering to his wife. 
Guilt changes both, but him it degrades. 
Hers is not a nature that can live in degrada- 
tion. To her no degradation is possible. 
Her sin was deliberate; she marched straight 
to her end; and the means were mortal, 
not alone to the man who died, but to her. 
Macbeth could as little comprehend the depth 
of her suffering as she his hesitancy in a deter- 
mined action. It is this fineness of nature, 
this over-possession by imagination, which 
renders her interesting, elevating her punish- 
ment into a sphere beyond the comprehension 
of a vulgar criminal. 

In that terrible second scene of Act II, per- 
haps the most awe-inspiring scene that Shake- 
speare ever wrote, the splendid qualities of 
Lady Macbeth are seen in their clearest light. 
She has taken wine to make her bold, but there 
is an exaltation in her brain beyond anything 
that wine could give. Her calmness is indeed 
unnatural, over-strained, by no means so 
composed as she would have her husband 
think. But having determined on her pur- 
pose, there is with her no returning, no thought 
of return. It is with a burst of real anger, of 



32 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

angry contempt, that she cries " Give me the 
daggers!" and her exaltation upholds her as 
she goes back and faces the dead man and the 
sleeping witnesses. She can even, as she 
returns, hear calmly the knocking that speaks 
so audibly to the heart of Macbeth, taking 
measures for their safety if anyone should 
enter. She can even look resolutely at her 
bloody hands, and I imagine she half believes 
her own cynical words when she says: 

A little water clears us of this deed: 
How easy is it then! 

Her will, her high nature (perverted, but not 
subdued) her steeled sensitiveness, the intoxi- 
cation of crime and of wine, sustain her in a 
forced calmness which she herself little sus- 
pects will ever fail her. How soon it does fail, 
or rather how soon the body takes revenge 
upon the soul, is seen next morning, when, 
after overacting her part in the famous 
words, "What, in our house?" she falls in a 
swoon, by no means counterfeit, we may be 
sure, though Macbeth, by his disregard of it, 
seems to think so. After this, we see her but 
rarely. A touch of the deepest melancholy 



MACBETH 33 

(" Nought's had, all's spent!") marks the few 
words spoken to herself as she waits for Mac- 
beth on the night which is, though unknown 
to her, to be fatal to Banquo. No sooner 
has Macbeth entered than she greets him in 
the old resolute spirit; and again on the 
night of the banquet she is, as ever, full of 
bitter scorn and contempt for the betraying 
weakness of her husband, prompt to cover 
his confusion with a plausible tale to the guests. 
She is still mistress of herself, and only the 
weariness of the few words she utters after 
the guests are gone, only the absence of the 
reproaches we are expecting, betray the change 
that is coming over her. One sees a trace of 
lassitude, that is all. 

From this point Lady Macbeth drops out of 
the play, until, in the fifth act, we see her for 
the last time. Even now it is the body rather 
than the soul that has given way. What 
haunts her is the smell and sight of the blood, 
the physical disgust of the thing. ''All the 
perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little 
hand." One hears the self-pitying note with 
which she says the words. Even now, even 
when unconscious, her scorn still bites at the 



34 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

feebleness of her husband. The will, in this 
shattered body, is yet unbroken. There is no 
repentance, no regret, only the intolerable 
vividness of accusing memory; the sight, the 
smell, ever present to her eyes and nostrils. 
It has been thought that the words " Hell is 
murky!" the only sign, if sign it be, of fear 
at the thought of the life to come, are probably 
spoken in mocking echo of her husband. 
Even if not, they are a passing shudder. It 
is enough for her that her hands still keep the 
sensation of the blood upon them. The 
imagination which stands to her in the place 
of virtue has brought in its revenge, and 
for her too there is left only the release of death. 
She dies, not of remorse at her guilt, but 
because she has miscalculated her power of 
resistance to the scourge of an over-acute 
imagination. 

1889. 



III. TWELFTH NIGHT 

The play of Twelfth Night, coming midway 
in the career of Shakespeare, perhaps just 
between As You Like It, the Arcadian comedy, 
and AlVs Well That Ends Well, a comedy in 
name, but kept throughout on the very edge 
of tragedy, draws up into itself the separate 
threads of wit and humour from the various 
plays which had preceded it, weaving them all 
into a single texture. It is in some sort a 
farewell to mirth, and the mirth is of the finest 
quality, an incomparable ending. Shakespeare 
has done greater things, but nothing more 
delightful. One might fancy that the play 
had been composed in a time of special comfort 
and security, when soul and body were in per- 
fect equipoise, and the dice of circumstance 
had fallen happily. A golden mean, a sweet 
moderation, reigns throughout. Here and 
there, in the more serious parts of the dialogue, 
we have one of Shakespeare's most beautiful 
touches, as in the divine opening lines, in 

35 



36 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

Viola's story of the sister who "never told her 
love," and in much of that scene; but in 
general the fancy is moderated to accord with 
the mirth, and refrains from sounding a very 
deep or a very high note. Every element 
of the play has the subtlest links with its fellow. 
Tenderness melts into a smile, and the smile 
broadens imperceptibly into laughter. With- 
out ever absolutely mingling, the two streams 
of the plot flow side by side, following the same 
windings, and connected by tributary currents. 
Was there ever a more transparently self- 
contradictory theory than that which removes 
one or two minute textual difficulties by the 
tremendous impossibility of a double date? 
No characteristic of the play is more unmis- 
takable than its perfect unity and sure swift- 
ness of composition, the absolute rondure of 
the of Giotto, done at a single sweep of the 
practised arm. It is such a triumph of con- 
struction that it is hard, in reading it, to get 
rid of the feeling that it has been written at 
one sitting. 

The protagonist of the play, the center of 
our amused interest, is certainly Malvolio, 
but it is on the fortunes of Viola, in her rela- 



TWELFTH NIGHT 37 

tions with the Duke and OHvia, that the action 
really depends. The Duke, the first speaker 
on the stage, is an egoist, a gentle and refined 
specimen of the class which has been summed 
up finally in the monumental character of Sir 
Willoughby Patterne. He is painted without 
satire, with the gentle forbearance of the 
profound and indifferent literary artist ; shown, 
indeed, almost exclusively on his best side, 
yet, though sadly used as a lover, he awakens 
no pity, calls up no champion in our hearts. 
There is nothing base in his nature; he is 
incapable of any meanness, never harsh or 
unjust, gracefully prone to the virtues which 
do not take root in self-denial, to facile kind- 
ness, generosity, sympathy; he can inspire a 
tender love; he can love, though but with a 
desire of the secondary emotions; but he is 
self-contemplative, in another sense from Mal- 
volio, one of those who play delicately upon 
life, whose very sorrows have an elegant melan- 
choly, the sting of a sharp sauce which re- 
freshes the palate cloyed by an insipid dish: 
a sentimental egoist. See, for a revealing 
touch of Shakespeare's judgment on him, 
his shallow words on woman's incapacity for 



38 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

love, so contradictory to what he has said 
the moment before, an inconsistency so ex- 
quisitely characteristic; both said with the 
same lack of vital sincerity, the same experi- 
mental and argumentative touch upon life. 
See how once only, in the fifth act, he blows 
out a little frothy bluster, a show of manli- 
ness, harsh words but used as goblin tales to 
frighten children; words whose vacillation in 
the very act comes out in the '' What shall I 
do?", in the pompous declaration, "My 
thoughts are ripe in mischief", in the side- 
touches, like an admiring glance aside in 
the glass at his own most effective attitude, 
** a savage jealousy that sometime savours 
nobly," and the like. When he coolly gives 
up the finally-lost Olivia, and turns to the 
love and sympathy he knows are to be found 
in Viola (as, in after days. Sir Willoughby will 
turn to his Lsetitia) the shallowness of his 
nature reveals itself in broad daylight. 

Olivia is the complement to Orsino, a tragic 
sentimentalist, with emotions which it pleases 
her to play on a little consciously, yet capable 
of feeling, of a pitch beyond the Duke's too 
loudly-speaking passion. Her cloistral mourn- 



TWELFTH NIGHT 39 

ing for her brother's death has in it something 
theatrical, not quite honest, a playing with the 
emotions. She makes a luxury of her grief, 
and no doubt it loses its sting. Then, when a 
new face excites her fancy, the artificial con- 
dition into which she has brought herself 
leaves her an easy prey, by the natural re- 
bound, to a possessing imagination. She 
becomes violently enamoured, yet honestly 
enough, of the disguised Viola, and her passion 
survives the inevitable substitution. Shake- 
speare has cleansed her from the stains of the 
old story, as he cleansed the heroine of Measure 
for Measure: the note of wantonness is never 
struck. She is too like the Duke ever to care 
for him. She has and she fills her place in the 
play, but the place is a secondary one, and she 
is without power over our hearts. 

We turn to Viola with relief. She is a 
true woman, exquisitely gracious in that silent 
attendance upon a love seeming to have been 
chosen in vain ; yet we can find for her no place 
in the incomparable company of Shakespeare's 
very noblest women. She has a touch of the 
sentimental, and will make a good wife for 
the Duke; she is without the strength of 



40 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

temperament or dignity of intellect which 
would scorn a delicately sentimental egoist. 
She is incapable of the heroism of Helena, of 
Isabella; she is of softer nature, of slighter 
build and lowlier spirit than they, while she has 
none of the overbrimming life, the intense and 
dazzling vitality, of Rosalind, Her male 
disguise is almost unapparent; she is covered 
by it as by a veil; it neither spurs her lips to 
sauciness, as with Rosalind, nor tames her 
into infinite dainty fears, as with Imogen; 
she is here, as she would be always, quiet, 
secure, retiring yet scarcely timid, with a 
pleasant playfulness breaking out now and 
then, the effect, not of high spirits, but of a 
whimsical sense of her secret when she feels 
safe in it, coming among women. Without 
any of the more heroic lineaments of her sex, 
she has the delicacy and tender truth that we 
all find so charming: an egoist supremely, 
when the qualities are his for possessing. 
She represents the typical female heart offer- 
ing itself to the man: an ingenuous spectacle, 
with the dew upon it of early morning. She is 
permitted to speak the tenderest words in 
which pathos crowns and suffuses love; and 



TWELFTH NIGHT 41 

once, under the spell of music, her small voice 
of low and tender changes rings out with im- 
mortal clearness, and for the moment, like the 
words she says, 

It gives a very echo to the seat 
Where love is throned. 

Of Malvolio all has been said, and but little 
shall be said of him here. He is a DonsQuixote 
in the colossal enlargement of his delusions, 
in the cruel irony of Fate, which twists topsy- 
turvy, making a mere straw in the wind of 
him, an eminently sober and serious man of the 
clearest uprightness, unvisited by a stray 
glimpse of saving humour. He is a man of 
self-sufficiency, a noble quality perilously near 
to self-complacency, and he has passed the 
bounds without knowing it. His unbend- 
ing solemnity is his ruin. Nothing presents 
so fair a butt for the attack of a guerilla- 
fighting wit. It is indeed the most generally 
obnoxious of all tolerable qualities; for it is 
a living rebuke of our petty levities, and it 
hints to us of a conscious superior. Even a 
soldier is not required to be always on drill. 
A lofty moralist, a starched formalist, like 



42 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

Malvolio, is salt and wormwood in the cakes 
and ale of gourmand humanity. It is with the 
nicest art that he is kept from rising sheer 
out of comedy into a tragic isolation of atti- 
tude. He is restrained, and we have no 
heartache in the laughter that seconds the most 
sprightly of clowns, the sharpest of serving- 
maids, and the incomparable pair of royster- 
ers, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew. 

Shakespeare, like Nature, has a tenderness 
for man in his cups, and will not let him come 
to grief. Sir Toby's wit bubbles up from no 
fountain of wisdom; it is shallow, radically 
bibulous, a brain-fume blown from a mere 
ferment of wits. His effect is truly and purely 
comic ; but it is rather from the way in which 
the playwright points and places him than from 
his own comic genius; in this how unlike 
Falstaff, who appears to owe nothing to cir- 
cumstances, but to escape from and dominate 
his creator. Sir Toby is the immortal type of 
the average " funny fellow " and boon-com- 
panion of the clubs or the alehouse; you may 
meet him any day in the street, with his 
portly build, red plump cheeks, and merry 
eyes twinkling at the incessant joke of life. 



TWELFTH NIGHT 43 

His mirth is facile, contagious, continual; 
it would become wearisome perhaps at too long 
a dose, but through a single comic scene it is 
tickling, pervasive, delightful. Sir Andrew 
is the grindstone on which Sir Toby sharpens 
his wit. He is an instance of a natural fool 
becoming truly comic by the subtle handling 
in which he is not allowed to awaken too 
keenly either pity or contempt. In life he 
would awaken both. He is a harmless sim- 
pleton, an innocent and unobtrusive bore, 
''a Slender grown adult in brainlessness;" 
and he is shown in all his fatuity without a note 
or touch of really ill-natured sarcasm. Shake- 
speare's humour plays round him, enveloping 
him softly; his self-esteem has no shock; 
unlike Malvolio, he is permitted to remain 
undeceived to the end. It is to his credit 
that he is not without glimmerings that he is 
a fool. The kindness, is, that the conviction 
is not forced upon him from without. 

1889. 



IV. MEASURE FOR MEASURE 

Measure for Measure is neither the last 
of the comedies nor the first of the tragedies. 
It is tragedy and comedy together, inextri- 
cably interfused, coexistent in a mutual con- 
tradiction; such a tangled web, indeed, as 
our life is, looked at by the actors in it, on the 
level of its action; with certain suggestions, 
open or concealed, of the higher view, the 
aspect of things from the point of view of a 
tolerant wisdom. The hidden activity of 
the Duke, working for ends of beneficent jus- 
tice, in the midst of the ferment and corrup- 
tion of the seething city; this figure of per- 
sonified Providence, watchfully cognizant of 
act and motive, has been conceived by Shake- 
speare (not yet come to his darkest mood, 
in which man is a mere straw in the wind of 
Destiny) to give a sense of security, centred 
within even such a maze as this. It is not from 
Isabella that we get any such sense. Her 
very courage and purity and intellectual light 

44 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE 43 

do but serve to deepen the darkness, when we 
conceive of her as but one sacrifice the more. 
Just as CordeUa intensifies the pity and terror 
of King Lear, so would Isabella's helpless 
virtues add the keenest ingredient to the cup 
of bitterness, but for the Duke. He is a 
foretaste of Prospero, a Prospero working 
greater miracles without magic ; and he guides 
us through the labyrinths of the play by a 
clue of which he has the secret. 

That Measure for Measure is a "painful" 
play (as Coleridge called it) cannot be denied. 
There is something base and sordid in the 
villany of its actors; a villany which has noth- 
ing of the heroism of sin. In Angelo we have 
the sharpest lesson that Shakespeare ever 
read self-righteousness. In Claudio we see 
a " gilded youth " with the gilding rubbed 
off. From Claudio's refined wantonness we 
sink deeper and deeper, through Lucio, who 
is a Claudio by trade, and without even the 
pretence of gilding, to the very lowest depth 
of a city's foulness and brutality. The ''hu- 
mours" of bawd and hangman and the cus- 
tomers of both are painted with as angry a 
hand as Hogarth's; bitten in with the etcher's 



46 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

acid, as if into the very flesh. Even Elbow, 
" a simple constable," a Dogberry of the 
lower dregs, struts and maunders before us 
with a desperate imbecility, in place of the 
engaging silliness, where silliness seemed a 
hearty comic virtue, of the " simple constable " 
of the earlier play. In the astonishing por- 
trait of Barnardine we come to the simply 
animal man; a portrait which in its savage 
realism, brutal truth to nature, cynical insight 
into the workings of the contended beast in 
man, seems to anticipate some of the achieve- 
ments of the modern Realistic novel. In the 
midst of this crowd of evil-doers walks the 
Duke, hooded body and soul in his friar's 
habit; Escalus, a solitary figure of broad and 
sturdy uprightness; Isabella, " a thing enskied 
and sainted," the largest-hearted and clearest- 
eyed heroine of Shakespeare; and apart, 
veiled from good and evil in a perpetual loneli- 
ness of sorrow, Mariana, in the moated grange. 
In the construction of this play Shakespeare 
seems to have put forth but a part of his 
strength, throwing his full power only into the 
great scenes, and leaving, with less than his 
customary care (in strong contrast to what we 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE 47 

note in Twelfth Night) frayed ends and edges 
of action and of characterization. The con- 
clusion, particularly, seems hurried, and the 
disposal of Angelo inadequate. I cannot but 
think that Shakespeare felt the difficulty, the 
impossibility, of reconciling the end which his 
story and the dramatic conventionalities re- 
quired with the character of Angelo as shown 
in the course of the play, and that he slurred 
over the matter as best he could. With 
space before him he might have convinced us, 
being Shakespeare, of the sincerity of Angelo's 
repentance and the rightfulness of his remis- 
sion; but as it is, crowded as all this convic- 
tion and penitence and forgiveness necessarily 
is into a few minutes of supplementary action 
one can hardly think that Coleridge expressed 
the natural feeling too forcibly in declaring 
"the strong indignant claim of justice" to 
be baffled by the pardon and marriage of 
Angelo. Of the scenes in which Angelo appears 
as the prominent actor (the incomparable 
second and fourth scenes of the second act, 
the first the temptation of Angelo, the second 
Angelo's temptation of Isabella) nothing can 
be said but that Shakespeare may have 



48 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

equalled, but has scarcely exceeded them, 
in intensity and depth of natural truth. 
These, with that other scene between Claudio 
and Isabella, make the play. 

It is part of the irony of things that the 
worst complication, the deepest tragedy in 
all this tortuous action, comes about by the 
innocent means of the stainless Isabella; who 
also, by her steadfast heroism, brings about 
the final peace. But for Isabella, Claudio 
would simply have died, perhaps meeting his 
fate, when it came, with a desperate flash of 
his father's courage; Angelo might have lived 
securely to his last hour, unconscious of his 
own weakness, of the fire that lurked in so 
impenetrable a flint. Shakespeare has some- 
times been praised for the subtlety with which 
he has barbed the hook for Angelo, in making 
Isabella's very chastity the keenest of tempta- 
tions. The notion is not peculiar to Shake- 
speare, but was hinted at, in his scrambling 
and uncertain way, by the writer of the old 
play on which Measure for Measure is founded. 
In truth, I do not see what other course was 
open to either in dealing with a situation which 
was not original in Shakespeare or in Whet- 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE 49 

stone. Angelo, let us remember, is not a 
hypocrite: he has no dishonourable intention 
in his mind; he conceives himself to be 
firmly grounded on a broad basis of rectitude, 
and in condemning Claudio he condemns a 
sin which he sincerely abhors. His treatment 
of the betrothed Mariana would probably 
be in his own eyes an act of frigid justice; it 
certainly shows a man not sensually-minded, 
but cold, calculating, likely to err, if he errs 
at all, rather on the side of the miserly virtues 
than of the generous sins. It is thus the 
nobility of Isabella that attracts him; her 
freedom from the tenderest signs of frailty, 
her unbiassed intellect, her regard for justice, 
her religious sanctity; and it is on his noblest 
side first, the side of him that can respond 
to these qualities, that he is tempted. I know 
of nothing more consummate than the way 
in which his mind is led on, step by step, 
towards the trap still hidden from him, the 
trap prepared by the merciless foresight of 
the chance that tries the professions and the 
thoughts of men. Once tainted, the corrup- 
tion is over him like leprosy, and every virtue 
withers into the corresponding form of vice. 



50 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

In Claudio it is the same touchstone, Isabella's 
unconscious and misdirected Ithuriel-spear, 
that reveals the basest forms of evil. A great 
living painter has chosen the central moment 
of the play, the moment when Claudio, having 
heard the terms on which alone life can be 
purchased, murmurs, ''Death is a fearful 
thing," and Isabella, not yet certain, yet 
already with the fear astir in her of her brother's 
weakness replies, ''And shamed life a hate- 
ful;" it is this moment which Holman Hunt 
brings before us in a canvas that, like his scene 
from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, is not only 
a picture but an interpretation. Against the 
stained and discoloured wall of his dungeon, 
apple-blossoms and blue sky showing through 
the grated window behind his delicate di- 
sheveled head, Claudio stands; a lute tied 
with red ribbons hangs beside him, a rose 
has fallen on the dark garments at his feet, 
one hand plays with his fetters (with how 
significant a gesture!) the other hand pinches, 
idly affectionate, the two intense hands that 
Isabella has laid upon his breast; he is think- 
ing, where to debate means shame, balancing 
the arguments; and with pondering eyes, 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE 51 

thrusting his tongue towards the corner of his 
just-parted lips with a movement of exquisite 
naturalness, he halts in indecision : all his mean 
thoughts are there, in that gesture, in those 
eyes; and in the warm and gracious youth 
of his whole aspect, passionately superficial 
and in love with life, there is something of the 
pathos of things " sweet, not lasting," a fragile, 
an unreasonable, an inevitable pathos. Isa- 
bella fronts him, an embodied conscience, 
all her soul in her eyes. Her eyes read him, 
plead with him, they are suppliant and judge; 
her intense fearfulness, the intolerable doubt 
of her brother's honour, the anguish of hope 
and fear, shine in them with a light as of tears 
frozen at the source. In a moment, with 
words on his lips whose far-reaching imagina- 
tion is stung into him and from him by the 
sharpness of the impending death, he will have 
stooped below the reach of her contempt, 
uttering those words. " Sweet sister, let me 
live!" 

After all, the final word of Shakespeare in 
this play is mercy; but it is a mercy which 
comes of the consciousness of our own need 
of it, and it is granted and accepted in humilia- 



52 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

tion. The lesson of mercy taught in The 
Merchant of Venice is based on the mutual 
blessing of its exercise, the graciousness of 
the spirit to which it is sign and seal. 

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven 
Upon the place beneath; it is twice blest; 
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. 

Here, the claim which our fellow-man has on 
our commiseration is the sad claim of mutual 
guiltiness before an absolute bar of justice. 

How would you be 
If He, which is the top of judgment, should 
But judge you as you are? 

And is not the " painfulness," which im- 
presses us in this sombre play, due partly to 
this very moral, and not alone to the circum- 
stances from which it disengages itself? For 
it is so '' painful " to think that we are no 
better than our neighbours. 

1890. 



V. THE WINTER'S TALE 

The Winter's Tale is a typically romantic 
drama, a "winter's dream, when nights are 
longest," constructed in defiance of proba- 
bilities, which it rides over happily. It has 
all the licence, and all the charm, of a fairy 
tale, while the matters of which it treats 
are often serious enough, ready to become 
tragic at any moment, and with much of 
real tragedy in them as it is. The merciful 
spirit of Shakespeare in his last period, grown 
to repose now after the sharp sunshine and 
storm of his earlier and middle years, the 
delicate art which that period matured in 
him, seen at its point of finest delicacy in this 
play and in The Tempest, alone serve to restrain 
what would otherwise be really painful in the 
griefs and mistaken passions of the perturbed 
persons of the drama. Something, the very 
atmosphere, the dawning of light among the 
clouds at their blackest, at first a hint, then 

53 



54 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

distinctly a promise, of things coming right 
at last, keeps us from taking all these dis- 
tresses, genuine as they are, too seriously. 
It is all human life, but life under happier 
skies, on continents where the shores of 
Bohemia are washed by "faery seas." An- 
achronisms abound, and are delightful. That 
Delphos should be an island, Giulio Romano 
contemporary with the Oracles, that Puritans 
should sing psalms to hornpipes, and a sudden 
remembrance call up the name of Jove or 
Proserpina to the forgetful lips of Christian- 
speaking characters: all this is of no more 
importance than a trifling error in the count 
of miles traversed by a witch's broomstick 
in a minute. Too probable figures would 
destroy the illusion, and the error is a separate 
felicity. 

It is quite in keeping with the other romantic 
characteristics of the play, that, judged by the 
usual standard of such a Romantic as Shake- 
speare himself, it should be constructed with 
exceptional looseness, falling into two very 
definite halves, the latter of which can again, 
in a measure, be divided. The first part, 
which takes place in Sicilia, is a study of 



THE WINTER'S TALE 55 

jealousy; the whole interest is concentrated 
upon the relations of the ''usual three, husband 
and wife and friend:" Leontes, Hermione, 
and Polixenes. The jealousy is in possession 
when we first see Leontes; it bursts forth, 
flames to its height, almost at once; in its 
furious heat runs through its whole course with 
the devouring speed of a race-horse; and then 
has its downfall, sudden and precipitate, and 
so dies of its own over-swiftness. Act III, 
Scene 2, ends the first part of the play; and 
with the third scene begins the second part, 
taking us from Sicilia, where the widowed and 
childless king is left mourning, to Bohemia, 
where the children, not long born when we last 
saw Sicilia, are now come to years of love. 
Then, all through the fourth act, we are with 
Florizel and Perdita; a sweet pastoral, varied 
with the dainty knaveries of a rogue as light- 
hearted as he is light-fingered; the pastoral, 
too, coming to a sudden and disastrous end, 
not without a doubtful gleam of hope for the 
future. With Act V we return to Sicilia, 
having from the beginning a sense that things 
are now at last coming to a desired end. 
Leontes' proved faithfulness, his sixteen years' 



56 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

burden of '* saint-like sorrow" gives him the 
right, one feels, to the happiness that is so 
evidently drawing near. All does, indeed, 
fall well, as the whole company comes together 
at the court of Sicilia, now re-united at 
last, husband with his lost wife (another 
Alcestis from the grave) father and mother 
with child, lover with lover (the course of true 
love smooth again) friend with friend, the faith- 
ful servants rewarded with each other, the 
worthless likable knave, even, in a good way of 
getting on in the world. 

The principal charm in The Winter^s Tale, 
its real power over the sources of delight, lies 
in the two women, true mother and daughter, 
whose fortunes we see at certain moments, the 
really important crises of their lives. Her- 
mione, as we have just time to see her before 
the blow comes, is happy wife and happy 
mother, fixed, as it seems, in a settled happi- 
ness. Grave, not gay, but with a certain quiet 
playfulness, such as so well becomes stately 
women, she impresses us with a feeling, partly 
of admiration, partly of attraction. It is 
with a sort of devoted reverence that we see 
her presently, patient, yet not abject, under the 



THE WINTER'S TALE 57 

dishonouring accusations of the fool lier lius- 
band. " Good my lords," she can say, 

I am not prone to weeping, as our sex 
Commonly are ; the want of which vain dew 
Perchance shall dry your pities; but I have 
That honourable grief lodged here which burns 
Worse than tears drown. 'Beseech you all, my lords 
With thoughts so qualified as your charities 
Shall best instruct you, measure me: and so 
The king's will be performed. 

All Hermione is in those words, no less than 
in the calm forthrightness of her defence, 
spoken afterwards in the Court of Justice. 
She has no self-consciousness, is not aware 
that at any time in her life she is heroic; ''a 
very woman," merely simple, sincere, having 
in reverence the sanctity of wifehood and in 
respect the dignity of queenship. In Perdita, 
the daughter so long lost and in the end so 
happily restored to her, we see, in all the 
gaiety of youth, the frank innocence and the 
placid strength of Hermione. She is the in- 
carnation of all that is delightful and desir- 
able in girlhood, as her mother incarnates for 
us the perfect charm of mature woman. 
And, coming before us where she does, a shep- 
herdess among pastoral people, "the queen of 



58 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

curds and cream," she seems to sum up and 
immortalize, in one delicious figure, our holi- 
day loves, our most vivid sensations of country 
pleasures. It is the grace of Florizel that he 
loves Perdita; he becomes charming to us 
because Perdita loves him. In these young 
creatures the old passion becomes new; and 
for an hour we too are as if we had never loved, 
but are now in the first moment of the unique 
discovery. 

This charm of womanhood, this purely 
delightful quality, of which the play has so 
much, though it remains, I think, our chief 
memory after reading or seeing the course of 
action, is not, we must remember, the only 
quality, the whole course of the action. Be- 
sides the ripe comedy, characteristic of Shake- 
speare at his latest, which indeed harmonizes 
admirably with the idyl of love to which it 
serves as background, there is also a harsh 
exhibition, in Leontes, of the meanest of 
the passions, an insane jealousy, petty and 
violent as the man who nurses it. For sheer 
realism, for absolute insight into the most 
cobwebbed corners of our nature, Shake- 
speare has rarely surpassed this brief study, 



THE WINTER'S TALE 59 

which, in its total effect, does but throw out 
in brighter relief the noble qualities of the 
other actors beside him, the pleasant qualities 
of the play they make by their acting. With 
Othello there is properly no comparison. 
Othello could no more comprehend the work- 
ings of the mind of Leontes than Leontes 
could fathom the meaning of the attitude of 
Othello. Leontes is meanly, miserably, de- 
gradedly jealous, with a sort of mental alien- 
ation or distortion, a disease of the brain like 
some disease of vision, by which he still " sees 
yellow " everywhere. The malady has its 
course, disastrously, and then ends in the only 
way possible: by an agonizing cure, suddenly 
applied. Are those sixteen years of mourning 
we may wonder, really adequate penance for 
the man? Certainly his suffering, like his 
criminal folly, was great ; and not least among 
the separate heartaches in that purifying 
ministry of grief must have been the memory 
of the boy Mamillius, the noblest and dearest 
to our hearts of Shakespeare's children. When 
the great day came (is it fanciful to note?) 
Hermione embraced her husband in silence; 
it was to her daughter that she first spoke. 



60 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

The end, certainly, is reconciliation, mercy; 
mercy extended even to the unworthy, in a 
spirit of something more than mere justice; 
as, in those dark plays of Shakespeare's great 
penultimate period, the end came with a sort 
of sombre, irresponsible injustice, an outrage 
of nature upon her sons, wrought in blind 
anger. We close The Winter^s Tale with a 
feeling that life is a good thing, worth living; 
that much trial, much mistake and error, 
may be endured to a happier issue, though the 
scars, perhaps, are not to be effaced. This 
end, on such a note, is indeed the mood in which 
Shakespeare took leave of life; in no weakly 
optimistic spirit, certainly, but with the air 
of one who has conquered fortune, not fallen 
under it; with a wise faith in the ultimate 
wisdom of events. 

1890. 



,VI.-. TITUS ANDRONICUS AND THE 
TRAGEDY OF BLOOD 

In considering the main question in regard 
to Titus Andronicus, the question of its 
Shakespearian or non-Shakespearian author- 
ship, it is well to set clearly before us at the 
outset the actual external evidence which we 
have. There is, first, the fact that no edition 
of the play was published during Shakespeare's 
lifetime with his name on the title-page. On 
the other hand, it was admitted into the First 
Folio in company with the mass of his un- 
doubted work. Meres, in his Palladis Tamia, 
published in 1598, refers to it as a genuine 
play of Shakespeare: "Witness ... for trag- 
edy, his Richard II., Richard III., Henry IV., 
King John, Titus Andronicus, and Romeo 
and Juliet." But Ravenscroft, who revived 
and altered the play in the time of James II., 
says in his preface to an edition published in 
1687: "I have been told by some anciently 
conversant with the stage that it was not 

61 



62 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

originally his [that is, Shakespeare's], but 
brought by a private author to be acted, and 
he only gave some master-touches to one or 
two of the principal characters." 

These conflicting statements have been re- 
peatedly brought into harmony by believers in 
Shakespeare's entire authorship, part-author- 
ship, and non-authorship, so as to prove that 
Shakespeare did and did not write the whole 
play, and that he wrote some part of it. The 
fact is, they are at the mercy of every theorizer, 
and can be easily bent to the service of any 
predetermined hypothesis. The absence of 
Shakespeare's name from the title, from one 
point of view a strong proof of an un-Shake- 
spearian authorship, may be met by the ob- 
vious cases of Richard II., Richard III., and 
other unsigned first editions of undoubtedly 
genuine plays. The attribution of the play 
to Shakespeare by Meres and the editors of 
the First Folio, apparently a still stronger 
proof that he really wrote it, may be almost as 
easily explained by supposing Ravenscroft's 
tradition to be true, namely, that Shakespeare 
revised for the stage a play written by someone 
else, and that his name thus came to be more 



TITUS ANDRONICUS 63 

and more closely associated with it, until in 
time it was supposed to be entirely his work. 
It is on the internal evidence, and the internal 
evidence alone, that the burden of proof really 
rests; all that we can require of a hypothesis 
intelligibly constructed from the evidence 
of the play itself, is that it shall not be at 
variance with the few external facts, on a 
rational interpretation of them. 

We know, almost to a certainty, that Shake- 
speare's earliest dramatic work consisted in 
adapting to the stage old plays in the stock of 
his players' company, and very probably in 
revising new works by unknown and unskil- 
ful playwrights. The second and third parts 
of King Henry VI are examples to our hand 
of the former manner of work: Titus Androni- 
cus may with some probability be conjectured 
to be an instance of the latter. I shall try 
to show that such a supposition is the least 
violent and fanciful that we can well make; 
accepting Ravenscroft's tradition, not from 
any particular reliance on its probable authen- 
ticity, but because, in the absence of any 
definite information to the contrary, it supplies 
me with a theory which most nearly agrees 



64 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

with my impressions after a careful examina- 
tion of the text itself. 

Titus Andronicus is a crude and violent, yet 
in certain respects superior, study in that pre- 
Shakespearian school which Symonds distin- 
guishes as "The Tragedy of Blood." This 
Tragedy of Blood, loud, coarse, violent, ex- 
travagantly hyperbolical, extravagantly real- 
istic, was the first outcome of a significant type 
of Elizabethan character, a hardy boisterous- 
ness of nature, a strength of nerve and rough- 
ness of taste, to which no exhibition of horror 
or cruelty could give anything but a pleasur- 
able shock. A popular audience required 
strong food, and got it. 

In the early days of the drama, when play- 
wrights were as yet new to their trade, and 
without much sense of its dignity as an art, 
this popular style of tragedy, in the hands of 
its popular manufacturers, was merely horrible. 
There were blood and vengeance, strong pas- 
sions and unrestrained wantonness, but as 
yet there was no conception of the difference 
between the horrible and the terrible. Later 
on, in the hands of Shakespeare and Webster, 
the old rank Tragedy of Blood, the favourite 



TITUS ANDRONICUS 65 

of the people, became transformed. The 
horrible became the terrible, a developed art 
guided the playwright's hand in covering with 
a certain magnificence the bare and grim 
outlines of malevolence and murder. It was 
the same thing, and yet new. The plot of 
Hamlet is the plot of a Tragedy of Blood of 
the orthodox school, it has all the elements of 
The Spanish Tragedy, but it is fused by 
imagination, humanized by philosophy, while 
the ungainly melodrama of Kyd is a mere 
skeleton, dressed in ill-fitting clothes, but 
without flesh and blood, without life. 
\ A careful examination of the plays left to us 
of the period at which Titus Andronicus must 
have been written will show us the exact nature 
of this species of bloody tragedy, its frequency, 
and its importance and influence. There may 
be traced a foreshadowing of it in the copious 
but solemn blood-shedding of the very first 
English dramas, the pseudo-classical Gorhoduc 
and The Misfortunes of Arthur. In these plays, 
behind the cold and lengthy speeches of the 
dramatic personages, a wonderful bustle is 
supposed to be going on. In the argument to 
Gorhoduc we read: "The sons fell to division 



66 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

and dissension. The younger killed the elder. 
The mother . . . killed the younger. The 
people . . . rose in rebellion and slew both 
father and mother. The nobility assembled 
and most terribly destroyed the rebels." 
In The Misfortunes of Arthur, a more loath- 
some story, filled with murder and rapine, 
serves as plot to a tragedy of stately speeches. 
As yet there is no attempt to move by thrilUng; 
a would-be classical decorum is preserved in 
the midst of carnage, and the sanguinary 
persons of the drama comment on their actions 
with singular gravity. But while the barbar- 
ous violence of action is reported as having 
happened, with a steady suppression of sights 
and details of blood, it is already potentially 
present in the background, in readiness for 
more powerful use by more powerful play- 
wrights. 

In Jeronymo (or Hieronymo) and The Spanish 
Tragedy, in reality a single play of colossal 
proportions, we have perhaps the first, and at 
once the foremost, representative of the genu- 
ine Tragedy of Blood. The stilted and formal 
phraseology is still employed, in a much modi- 
fied and improved form, but there is a real 



TITUS ANDRONICUS 67 

attempt to move the hardy susceptibilities 
of an audience; the murders occur on the stage, 
and are executed with much fierceness, and 
the language of overblown rant is at least in- 
tended (and was probably found) to be very 
stirring. The action of both plays is slow, 
dull, wearisome, without vivacity or natural- 
ness; the language alternates from the ridicu- 
lously trivial to the ridiculously inflated; while 
in the way of character there are the very 
slightest indications of here and there a mood 
or a quality. But the play is important by 
reason of its position at the head of a long line 
of tragedies, containing more than one of the 
dramas of Marlowe, and scarcely coming to an 
end in the masterpiece of Webster. 

The keynote of Kyd's conception of tragedy 
is murder. Of that most terrible of tragedies, 
the tragedy of a soul, he is utterly unconscious. 
Actual physical murder, honourably in the 
duel, or treacherously by the hand of one of 
those wonderful villains who live and move 
and have their being on the Elizabethan stage: 
this is the very abracadabra of his craft. A 
fine situation must have a murder or two in it. 
A troublesome character must be removed by 



68 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

a murder, and the hero and heroine must also 
be murdered, for the sake of pathos, and a 
rounded termination, one after the other. 
Last of all the villain, or the two or three 
villains, as is more likely, meet with unexpected 
violent endings, thereby affording a moral 
lesson of the most practical and obvious kind. 
In addition there should be a madness, and 
several atrocities. Madness, only second 
though distinctly second, to murder, is an 
ingredient in many of these plays, notably 
The Spanish Tragedy. It was Hieronymo's 
madness that attracted that greater poet of 
the famous '^ additions," Jonson or another, 
who, finding it a thing of nought, a conven- 
tional, frigidly rhetorical, stage lunacy, left 
it a thing of pity and terror. ' 

' Contemporaneous with The Spanish Tragedy 
but less representative of the movement, are 
several other melodramas; the anonymous 
Soliman and Perseda, and Peele's Battle of 
Alcazar, for instance. Becoming, not more 
human, but more artistic, the Tragedy of 
Blood found a willing exponent in the great, 
daring, but unballasted genius Marlowe, and 
in the authors of LusVs Dominion, 



TITUS ANDRONICUS 69 

It is to this period that Titus Andronicus 
belongs; a period of more mature art, more 
careful construction, more power of character- 
ization, but of almost identical purpose. 
These plays are distinguished from The Spanish 
Tragedy on the one hand, but they are after all 
still more sharply distinguished from Lear, 
The Duches of Malfi, or even The Revenger^s 
Tragedy, and the harsh, powerful dramas of 
Marston, on the other. 

Marlowe's Jew of Malta is the most generally 
known of the Tragedies of Blood, and it is 
indeed not an ill specimen of the developed 
style. Marlowe, who originated so much, 
cannot be said to have originated this manner. 
It was popular before his time, but, finding in 
it a certain affinity with his own genius, he 
attempted it, once, perhaps twice, and in 
stamping it in his own mint raised its currency. 
The Jew of Malta belongs distinctly to the 
school of Kyd, but it is raised above its pre- 
cursors, not only by reason of the frequent 
splendour of its poetry, but still more by the 
presence of a finely-imagined character, an 
idealizing of the passion of greed. The play 
is Barabas; with his entrance and exit the 



70 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

good in it comes in and goes out. The cap- 
tains, brutes, and bullies, the shadowy Abigail, 
all the minor characters, are hasty sketches, 
rank if not bodiless, mere foils to the malevo- 
lent miser. Barabas himself, as it ha»s been 
so often pointed out, is a creation only in 
the first two acts, where he foreshadows 
Shylock; in all the later portion of the play 
he is only that " monster with a large painted 
nose " of whom Lamb has spoken. Marlowe 
and Shakespeare, it is sad to recollect, alike 
degraded their art, Marlowe more than once, 
Shakespeare at least once, to please the ears of 
the groundlings. The intentional debasement 
of Barabas, in the latter half of The Jew of 
Malta, from a creation into a caricature, is 
only equalled, but it is equalled, by that similar 
debasement of Falstaff in The Merry Wives of 
Windsor, from the prophet and philosopher 
of this world's cakes and ales into an imbecile 
buffoon, helpless, witless, and ridiculous. 

Lust's Dominion, a play issued under the 
name of Marlowe, but assigned by Mr. Collier, 
with great probability, to Dekker, Haughton, 
and Day, is a play of the same class as The 
Jew of Malta, overloaded to an inconceivable 



TITUS ANDRONICUS 71 

extent with the most fiendish crimes, but in 
several scenes really beautiful and fanciful, 
and containing, like The Jew of Malta, a single 
predominant character, the villain Eleazar, 
drawn with abundant strength and some 
precision. This play is the very quintessence 
of the Tragedy of Blood; crammed from end 
to end with the most ingeniously atrocious 
villanies, but redeemed from utter vulgarity 
by a certain force and even delicacy of ex- 
pression, and a barbaric splendour of horror 
not untinged with ferocious irony. It is a 
work of art, if of a gross and immature kind, 
in a sense in which The Spanish Tragedy is 
not. The old outlines remain, but they are 
filled in with bold but glaring colouring, 
with coarsely-painted human figures, and are 
set in a distinct, though loud, key of colour. 
The thing is revolting, but it is no longer con- 
temptible. 

Between these two plays, but rather in 
company with the former than the latter, I 
would place Titus Andronicus. Like The 
Jew of Malta and Lust's Dominion, it con- 
tains the full-length portrait of a villain; 
like The Spanish Tragedy, its most powerful 



72 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

scenes are devoted to the revengeful madness 
of a wronged old man. 

I In construction Titus Andronicus belongs 
distinctively to the Tragedy of Blood: it is 
full of horrors and of bloodthirsty characters. 
There are, if I remember rightly, thirteen 
murders and executions, besides various out- 
rages and mutilations, in the course of the play. 
More than half, including a torture and a 
banquet of human flesh, are enacted on the 
stage. As regards the characters, there is 
in Titus a fine note of tragic pathos, in Aaron 
a certain vigour and completeness of wicked- 
ness, in Tamora a faint touch of power, but in 
Lavinia, in Bassianus, in Saturninus, in the 
sons of Titus and Tamora, scarcely the sem- 
blance of an attribute. The powerful sketch 
of Aaron is a good deal indebted to the Barabas 
of Marlowe. There is much the same compre- 
hensive malevolence, feeding on itself rather 
than on any external provocation; a malevo- 
lence even deeper in dye, if less artistic in 
expression. Both have a delight in evil, 
apart from the pleasure anticipated from an 
end gained: they revel in it, like a virtuous 
egoist in the consciousness of virtue. Eleazar, 



TITUS ANDRONICUS 73 

in LusVs Dominion, is a slightly different type 
of the complete villain. His is a cold, calcula- 
ting wickedness, not raving nor furious, but 
set on a certain end. He enjoys his villany, 
but in a somewhat sad and sober fashion. 
He is supremely ambitious; to that ambition 
all other qualities of evil bow, his lust, his 
cruelty, his spite, his pride; everything. He 
uses his passions and the passions of others as 
trained servants; and he sets them tasks, 
always for his advancement. The three vil- 
lains, Barabas, Aaron, and Eleazar, are three 
of the earliest, three primary types, of that long 
series in which the Elizabethan dramatists 
attempted to read the problem of Renaissance 
Italy : of wickedness without moral sense, with- 
out natural conscience, wickedness cultivated 
almost as an aesthetic quality, and attaining 
a strenuous perfection. 

The character of Titus is on a higher plane 
than that of Aaron; it has more humanity, 
and a pathos that is the most artistic quality of 
the play. Titus is the one character, absolutely 
the only one, who moves us to any sympathy 
of emotion. The delineation is unequal, there 
are passages and scenes of mere incoherency 



74 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

and flatness, speeches put into his mouth of 
the most furious feebleness, but at its best, 
in the later scenes of half real and half pre- 
tended madness, the character of Titus is 
not so very much below the Hieronymo of the 
*' additions." At its worst it sinks to almost 
the level of the original Hieronymo. Such 
curious inequality is not observable in any 
other person of the play. Aaron and Tamora 
are the Aaron and Tamora of a single con- 
ception, worked out with more or less skill on 
a level line. The dummies of the play are 
consistent dummies. Lavinia is a single and 
unmixed blunder. But Titus, by his situa- 
tion the most interesting character of the play, 
is at one time fine, at another foolish, in a way 
for which it is difficult to account if a single 
author wrote the whole play. 

Lavinia, I have said, is a single and un- 
mixed blunder. There is no other word for it. 
I can never read the third scene of the second 
act without amazement at the folly of the 
writer, who, requiring in the nature of things 
to win our sympathy for his afflicted heroine, 
fills her mouth with the grossest and vilest 
insults against Tamora, so gross, so vile, so 



TITUS ANDRONICUS 75 

unwomanly, that her punishment becomes 
something of a retribution instead of being 
wholly a brutality. There is every dramatic 
reason why the victim should not share the 
villain's soul, every dramatic reason why her 
situation should be one of pure pathos. Noth- 
ing but the coarseness of nature of the man 
who first wrote it can explain the absurdity. 
And this is Shakespeare's first heroine, the 
first of the series which ends with Imogen, in 
the opinion of those critics who assign the whole 
of Titus Andronicus to the young Shakespeare! 
The character of Lavinia is alone enough to 
disprove this opinion; and the character of 
Lavinia only belongs to the general concep- 
tion of the play, which is not at all better than 
might be expected of a clever follower of ap- 
proved models, a disciple of Marlowe in his 
popular melodrama. But when we have said 
this, we have not said everything. The beauty 
and force of certain passages, and the impres- 
siveness of certain scenes, are so marked, 
and so markedly above the level of the sur- 
rounding work, that we may well hesitate to 
deny to Shakespeare all part or lot in it. 
Two positions I think we are justified in 



76 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

assuming. First, that Titus Andronicus is so 
absolutely unlike all Shakespeare's other early 
work, that it is, to say the least, improbable 
that the whole play can be his; and second, 
that the assumption of a revision by him of 
another man's work is, on the face of it, quite 
probable and likely. Shakespeare's first origi- 
nal plays were bright, fanciful, witty, dainty 
comedies, touched with the young joy of 
existence, full of irreflective gaiety and playful 
intellect; nowhere dwelling on things horrible 
and unpleasant, but rather avoiding the very 
approaches of anything so serious as tragedy. 
It was the Court Comedies of Lyly rather than 
the Bloody Tragedies of Kyd which influenced 
the earliest dramatic writings of Shakespeare. 
Romeo and Juliet, a romantic drama with a 
tragical ending, but not a tragedy in the sense 
in which King Lear is a tragedy, shows us 
very distinctly the manner in which Shake- 
speare, even at a much later period than the 
latest assignable to Titus A7idronicus, dealt 
with the sadnesses and incongruities of life, 
with sorrow, loss, death, affliction, wrong. 
There is not a touch, not a tone of horror; 
all sorrow resolves itself into ''tears of perfect 



TITUS ANDRONICUS 77 

moan;" all tragedy dies upon a song. It is 
exquisitely pathetic, but there is little hint of 
the unspeakable pathos of Lear. Now Titus 
Andronicus is full of gross horror, sickening 
with the scent of blood, materially moving. 
It seems nothing less than impossible that the 
same hand should have written, first this play, 
in which the playwright revels coarsely in 
blood and horror; then Romeo and Juliet, in 
which a tragic story is treated with only a 
lyrical rendering of the tragedy; then King 
Lear, burdened with an almost intolerable 
weight of terror, but kept sweet, and pure, and 
fair by the twin quality of pity. Unless 
Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus he never 
touched tragedy without making it either 
lyrically pathetic or piteously terrible. And 
it is only natural to suppose that he never did, 
and never could have done so. 

On the other hand, taking into consideration 
the differences of workmanship traceable in 
the play, and the comparative force and beauty 
of certain parts, it is not impossible that Shake- 
speare had, if not a hand, at least some finger 
in it. It is known that he was at one time the 
"Johannes-fac-totum" of a players' company 



78 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

and that he was employed in furbishing up 
old plays for fresh performance. Suppose a 
new play, by a ''private author," written, 
somewhat clumsily, in a popular style, to be 
offered to the theatre: what would be more 
likely than that the thing should be handed 
over to the dramatic journeyman, young 
Shakespeare, for brief revision and rectifica- 
tion? Young Shakespeare, little as he may 
care for the style, of course must hold himself 
subservient to the ideals of the original play- 
wright; but he heightens, where he can, the 
art of the delineations, inserts some passages 
of far more impressive significance, perhaps 
almost some scenes, and touches the dead level 
of the language into something of grace and 
freshness. Thus we have a stupid plot, a 
medley of horrible incidents, an undercurrent 
of feeble language; and, in addition, some 
powerful dramatic writing, together with bright 
passages here and there, in which a fresh and 
living image is expressed finely. 

Coleridge's fancy or theory as to Shake- 
speare's way of dealing with a play in revising 
it; beginning indifferently, adding only a line 
here and there, but getting more interested 



TITUS ANDRONICUS 79 

as he went on, applies very well to Titus 
Andronicus. All the first act is feeble and 
ineffectual; here and there a line, a couplet, 
a short passage, such as the touch on mercy, 
or the speech of Titus (I. i. 187-200) puts a 
colour on the pale outline, and permits us for 
a moment to think of Shakespeare. But the 
"purple patches" are woefully far apart. 
Such entire brainlessness as goes to the making 
of the very important piece of dialogue be- 
tween the 270th and the 290th lines of the 
first scene of the first act, is scarcely to be 
found throughout the whole play. All the 
business of the act is confused and distorted; 
lengthy where it should be short, short where 
it ought to be extended. There is not a touch 
in it, probable or possible, of the shaping hand 
of Shakespeare; of itself the act is enough to 
disprove his authorship of the complete 
play. 

With the second act there is a decided im- 
provement. Aaron, the notable villain of the 
piece makes his first appearance; Tamora 
blossoms out into Qg full flower of wicked- 
ness; and in the mouths of these anything 
but idyllic personages we have some of those 



80 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

fine idyllic passages which seem not unlike 
the early style of Shakespeare. For myself, 
I can see no touch of Shakespeare in the first 
lines of the act: 

"Now climbeth Tamora Ol3mipus' top," 

which some would assign to his account. They 
are a very tolerable but entirely flagrant 
imitation of Marlowe's most rhetorical manner; 
by no means above the reach of the first 
author of the play, although, in a sense, above 
his level. But in some later passages it seems 
not unpermissible to see the token of Shake- 
speare's hand. The lines from 80 (''She is a 
woman, therefore may be woo'd" ^) onward 
through a speech or two, have unquestion- 
ably a truer ring, a more easy flow and vigour, 

^ This adage seems to have been popular in Ehzabethan 
times, and is by no means necessarily a Shakespearian 
sentiment. Beside the exactly parallel passage in the First 
Part of King Henry VI, and the partly parallel passage in 
Richard III, there is another, tolerably close, in The Birth 
of Merlin (I. i.) one of the so-called "Doubtful Plays," 
but as doubtful, in an opposite sense, as Othello: 

For her consent, let your fair suit go on; 
She is a woman, sir, and will be won. 



TITUS ANDRONICUS 81 

than the surrounding dialogue. Three lines, 
a little further on : 

The emperor's court is like the House of Fame, 
The palace full of tongues, of eyes and ears : 
The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull; 

have a genuine impressiveness, and one is 
almost inclined to refer them to Shakespeare, 
the more so that they have so much the 
appearance of an insertion that they could 
be omitted without the least necessary break 
in the sense. In the second and third scenes 
there are several well-known passages, often 
attributed to Shakespeare: "The hunt is up, 
the morn is bright and gray," (1-6); the 
companion piece of the third scene, "The 
birds chant melody on every bush;" and, 
again the powerful description of the " barren 
and detested vale" (91 et seq.). None of these 
are wholly unworthy of Shakespeare's youth. 
The second passage (scene iii. 10-29, and not 
by any means ending, as some would have it 
end, at the 15th line) impresses me as the 
most melodious and fanciful in the play, and, 
more than that, a really beautiful interlude. 
If there is any Shakespeare in the play, this 
is. But the speech of Tamora (91-108) 



82 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

powerful as it is in some respects, is somewhat 
less obviously Shakespearian. In the blunder- 
ing and foolish scene between Tamora and 
Lavinia, further on in the third scene, there is, 
in conception and general execution, about as 
much of Shakespeare as of Bacon; but nine 
really pathetic lines (158-166) I should like 
to think Shakespeare's. Lavinia says to De- 
metrius and Chiron, referring to Tamora, 
" Do thou entreat her show a woman pity." 

Chi. What ! would'st thou have me show myself a bastard? 

Lav. 'Tis true; the raven doth not hatch a lark: 
Yet have I heard (0 could I find it now!) 
The lion, mov'd with pity, did endure 
To have his princely paws par'd all away. 
Some say the ravens foster forlorn children, 
The whilst their own birds famish in the nest: 
O, be to me, though thy hard heart say no, 
Nothing so kind, but something pitiful! 

The turn of these lines, particularly the last 
two, is good; and it will be noticed that 
Tamora's next speech, "I know not what it is: 
away with her," might even better have come 
directly in answer to Lavinia's first appeal: 

Do thou entreat her show a woman pity. 

The "it" of "I know not what it means" 
would then naturally refer to the "pity" of 



TITUS ANDRONICUS 83 

the preceding line; as it is, there is some 
irregularity in such an answer, referring as it 
does to nothing more direct than, *'0 be to 
me . . . something pitiful!" The lines have 
quite the appearance of an insertion. 

The last three acts are far superior to the 
first two. They are mainly concerned with 
the wrongs and madness of Titus, which I 
suspect to have been entered into by Shake- 
speare with more sympathy than the other 
parts of the play, and almost throughout 
dignified and humanized by him. I do not 
mean to say that Shakespeare wrote all, or 
most, of the speeches assigned to Titus through- 
out the play, or even in the last three acts. 
The touches by which a great poet can raise 
the work of a small poet from puerility to 
fineness may be slight and delicate; and are, 
indeed, far too delicate to be distinguished 
and emphasized by the critic. Nor is the 
service, which I suspect Shakespeare to have 
rendered his predecessor, complete. Not a 
few empty and rhetorical passages put into 
the mouth of the suffering hero seem like 
untouched fragments of the former stuff. 
If anyone will be at the pains to compare, 



84 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

say the speech of Titus at line 65 (Act III) 
with the speech of Titus at line 33, he will see, 
I cannot but think, a considerable difference; 
and a glance at the tawdry rant of Marcus, 
at the close of the second act, will still further 
emphasize the contrast if compared with, say, 
the five lines of the same speaker at line 82 
of the third act. In all the earlier part of the 
play, and throughout in perhaps every char- 
acter but Titus, such touches of Shakespeare 
as we can distinguish are occasional, and are 
merely brief additions and revisions of single 
passages. But in the "magnificent lunacy" 
of Titus (as Symonds rightly calls it) there is 
a note of tragic pathos which seems to me 
distinctly above the reach of an imitative 
dramatist of the School of Blood. How much 
of Shakespeare there is in this latter part of 
the play it is hazardous to conjecture. We 
cannot so much point to certain lines, as in 
the earliest acts, and say, "This reads like 
Shakespeare;" but we perceive a finer spirit 
at work, and the keener sense that went to 
the making or mending of some whole scenes, 
or main parts of them. Swinburne has pointed 
out that the significant arrow-scenes are written 



TITUS ANDRONICUS 83 

in blank verse of more variety and vigour than 
we find in the baser parts of the play; and 
these, he adds, if any scenes, we may surely 
attribute to Shakespeare. I would add Fome 
part, by no means all, of the second scene of 
the fifth act; especially that grimly ironical 
passage from the 80th line onwards about 
twenty lines. The first 60 lines of the scene, 
powerful as they are, have no Shakespeariaa 
quality in them: they are directly studied 
from Marlowe, no doubt by the '' private 
author," who was certainly a disciple of Mar- 
lowe, and not without a measure of cleverness. 
Again, the devilish utterances of Aaron (Act 
V. sc. i.) some of the most noticeable speeches 
in the play, are absolutely un-Shakespearian, 
while distinctly in the manner of Marlowe. 
Indeed, so closely are they imitated from the 
confession of Barabas {Jew of Malta, Act II. 
sc. ii.) that we can hardly be surprised at the 
occasional attribution of the play to Marlowe; 
worse than foolish as this is on every really 
reasonable ground. All the ending of the play, 
the grotesquely horrible dish of human flesh, 
the tortures, is, of course, entirely due to the 
original author. Nothing is more clearly and 



86 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

more closely connected with the model Tragedy 
of Blood; and nothing certainly could be 
more unlike Shakespeare. 

Thus we see, on glancing through the play, 
that Titus Andronicus, in its plot, general 
conception, and most of its characters, belongs 
distinctly to the Tragedy of Blood, and, being 
in these respects inferior to the best of it, may 
be considered the work of a disciple of the 
school, not of an acknowledged master; 
while in certain parts it seems to be lifted 
above itself, vivified and dignified: a com- 
bination which naturally suggests the revision 
of an inferior work by a superior master. The 
closer we examine it, the more natural does this 
view become, and the more probable does it 
seem that in Titus Andronicus we have the 
work of an unknown writer revised by the 
young Shakespeare. To consider it the work 
of an amateur, a disciple of the School of" 
Blood, but not a great writer, raised to its 
present interesting and imperfect state by 
Shakespeare's early revision (which is sub- 
stantially the Ravenscroft tradition) seems to 
explain the otherwise inexplicable mixture in 
this singular play of good and bad, twaddle 



TITUS ANDRONICUS 87 

and impressiveness; and seems to explain, on 
the one hand, why it is so good as it is, on the 
other, why it is no better. I do not think 
it js very sensible to try to assign the play, 
as originally written, to some well-known 
author of the time, such as Greene or Marlowe, 
rather than to the " private author." Such 
resemblances of these writers as occur might 
naturally be imitations; but to father on 
Marlowe, in especial, the meaner parts of the 
play, is a quite gratuitous insult to his memory. 
1885. 



VII. THE QUESTION OF HENRY VIII 

Henry VIII was first printed in the Folio 
of 1623, where it ends the series of "Histories." 
The main historical authorities were, in the 
first four acts, Holinshed's Chronicles; in the 
fifth, Foxe's Acts and Monuments of the Church, 
commonly known as The Book of Martyrs. 
The play is a good deal indebted, directly or 
indirectly, to a narrative then in MS., George 
Cavendish's Life of Cardinal Wolsey, largely 
quoted by both Holinshed and Hall, though 
the book itself was not published till 1641. 
The play follows its authorities closely, alike 
in the main course of incident and in the gen- 
eral choice of language ; but there are numerous 
deviations from the chronological order of 
events. 

So far we have dealt with facts: what re- 
mains must be but conjecture. It is as well to 
say frankly that we know with certainty 
neither who wrote Henry VIII, nor when it 
was written. I shall give, first, the scanty 
records, the few external facts relating to the 

88 



THE QUESTION OF HENRY VHI 89 

play; then, the various theories which have 
been brought forward as to its date and author- 
ship; not having much hope of being able, 
finally, to speak myself on all points with 
the enviable assurance of one whose mind is 
fully and confidently made up. 

The first allusion to a play on the subject 
of Henry VIII is found in an entry in the 
Stationers' Registers under date February 12, 
1604-5: '' Nath. Butter] yf he get good allow- 
ance for the Enterlude of K. Henry 8th before 
he begyn to print it, and then procure the war- 
dens hands to yt for the entrance of yt, he is 
to have the same for his copy." This play, 
which Collier ''feels no hesitation" in sup- 
posing to be the play which we find in the 
Folio, may more reasonably be identified with 
the rough and scrambling historical comedy 
of Samuel Rowley, When you see me, you know 
mee; or, the famous Chronicle Historie of King 
Henrie the Eight, with the berth and vertuous 
life of Edward Prince of Wales, which Nathaniel 
Butter published in 1605. It is a bluff, 
hearty, violently Protestant piece of work, 
the Protestant emphasis being indeed the 
most striking thing about it. The verse is 



90 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

formal, with one or two passages of somewhat 
heightened quality; the characters include 
a stage Harry, a very invertebrate Wolsey, 
a Will Sommers whose jokes are as thin as 
they are inveterate, a Queen Katharine of the 
doctrinal and magnanimous order, a modest 
Prince Edward; with minor personages of 
the usual sort, and, beyond the usual, a Dog- 
berry and Verges set of watchmen, with whom, 
together with one Black Will, King Henry has 
a ruffling scene. The play was reprinted in 
1613, in 1621, and again in 1632. 

The next allusion which we find to a play on 
the subject of Henry VIII is in connection with 
the burning of the Globe Theatre on June 29, 
1613. Among the Harleian MSS. there is a 
letter from Thomas Lorkin to Sir Thomas 
Pickering, dated 'Hhe last day of June, 1613," 
in which we read: ''No longer since than 
yesterday, while Bourbege his companie were 
acting at y^ Globe the play of Hen =8, and 
there shooting of certayne chambers in way 
of triumph, the fire catch'd." On July 6, 
1613, Sir Henry Wotton writes to his nephew: 
''Now to let matters of state sleep; I will 
entertain you at the present with what hath 



THE QUESTION OF HENRY VIII 91 

happened this week at the Bank-side. The 
king's players had a new play, called All is 
True, representing some principal pieces of the 
reign of Henry the Eighth, which was set 
forth with many extraordinary circumstances 
of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of 
the stage; the Knights of the Order, with 
their Georges and Garter, the guards with their 
embroidered coats, and the like: sufficient in 
truth, within a while, to make greatness 
very familiar, if not ridiculous. Now King 
Henry, making a mask at the Cardinal Wolsey's 
house, and certain cannons being shot off at 
his entry, some of the paper or other stuff 
wherewith one of them was stopped, did light 
on the thatch, where, being thought at first 
but an idle smoke, and their eyes more atten- 
tive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran 
round like a train, consuming, within an 
hour, the whole house to the very ground." 
A ballad written on the occasion of ''The 
Lamentable Burning of the Globe Play-House 
on S. Peter's Day " has for the refrain of every 
stanza: 

sorrow! O pitiful sorrow! 
And yet it AH is True; 



92 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

an evident allusion to the title of the play 
whose performance ended so disastrously. 
The ballad mentions that 

The fearful fire began above 
By firing chambers too; 

and we learn from another stanza that the trial 
of Katharine formed a part of the action: 

Away ran Lady Katharine, 
Nor waited for her trial. 
Such trial was not in her part; 
Escape was all she had at heart. 

In the 1615 edition of Stowe's Annates, "con- 
tinued and augmented by Edmond Howes," 
we read under date 1613: "also upon St. 
Peter's Day last the playhouse or theatre, 
called the Globe, upon the Bankside, near 
London, by negligent discharging of a piece 
of ordnance close to the south side thereof, 
took fire, and the wind suddenly dispersed the 
flame round about, and in a very short spacG 
the whole building was quite consumed, and 
no man hurt; the house being filled with 
people to behold the play, viz., of Henry the 
Eighth : and the next spring it was new builded 
in far fairer manner than before." 



THE QUESTION OF HENRY VHI 93 

It will thus be seen that in 1613 a play on 
the subject of Henry VIII was being actedjat 
the Globe under the name of All is True, 
It is described by Sir Henry Wotton as "a 
new play." Further, it represented "King 
Henry making a mask at the Cardinal Wolsey's 
house," where chambers were discharged in 
his honour, as in the Folio Henry VIII, i. iv. 
(stage direction, after line 49: "Drum and 
trumpet, chambers discharged"). It also ap- 
parently contained a scene in which Katha- 
rine was brought to trial. The name All is 
True is perfectly appropriate to the play which 
we have in the Folio, and in the Prologue there 
are three expressions which may be taken as 
references to such a title: line 9: "may here 
find truth, too;" line 18: "To rank our 
chosen truth with such a show;" and line 21: 
"To make that only true we now intend." 
So far, we have a certain show of evidence, 
very slight indeed, which might lead us to 
suppose (in the absence of other evidence to 
the contrary) that the play All is True, acted 
as a new play at the Globe in 1613, was that 
which is printed as Henry VIII in the First 
Folio of Shakespeare. There is nothing, how- 



94 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

ever, to tell us that this play of 1613 was by 
Shakespeare. 

Leaving for the present the question of date, 
we must now consider the more important 
question of authorship. And here we should 
premise that the fact of Henry VIII having 
been printed in the First Folio is far from being 
a conclusive argument on behalf of its genuine- 
ness, whole or partial. The editors of the 
First Folio had an elastic sense of their editorial 
responsibilities. They admitted Titus Androni- 
cus and the three parts of Henry VI, which 
it is practically certain that Shakespeare did 
no more than revise; as well as The Taming 
of the Shrew, which we know to be a recast 
of the earlier play The Taming of a Shrew. 
They did not admit Pericles, which was pub- 
lished in Quarto under Shakespeare's name, 
universally recognized at the time as his, 
and, in the greater part of it, so obviously 
Shakespearian that its authenticity could 
not have been seriously doubted. 

The first to call attention to the metrical 
peculiarities of Henry VIII was a certain Mr. 
Roderick, Fellow of Magdalen College, Cam- 
bridge, some of whose notes are given in the 



THE QUESTION OF HENRY VIII 95 

sixth and posthumous edition of Thomas 
Edwardes' Canons of Criticism, published in 
1758. Roderick notes (1) that "there are in 
this Play many more verses than in any other, 
which end with a redundant syllable . . . 
this Play has very near two redundant verses 
to one in any other Play;" (2) that "the 
Ccesurce, or Pauses of the verse, are full as 
remarkable;" (3) "that the emphasis, arising 
from the sense of the verse, very often clashes 
with the cadence that would naturally result 
from the metre." "What Shakespeare in- 
tended by all this," he adds, "I fairly own 
myself ignorant." 

Before this, Johnson had observed that the 
genius of Shakespeare comes in and goes out 
with Katharine, and that every other part 
might be easily conceived and easily written. 
Later, in 1819, Coleridge distinguished Henry 
VIII from Shakespeare's other historical plays 
as "a sort of historical masque or show- 
play." Even Knight was forced to acknowl- 
edge that the moral which he traces through 
the first four acts has to be clenched in the 
fifth by referring to history for it. It was 
not, however, till 1850 that it occurred to 



96 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

anyone to follow out these clues by calling 
in question the entire authenticity of the 
play. In that year the suggestion was made by 
three independent investigators. Emerson, in 
his Representative Men, treating of Shake- 
speare, says passingly: "In Henry VIII I 
think I see plainly the cropping out of the 
original rock on which his own finer stratum 
was laid. The first play was written by a 
superior, thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. 
I can mark his lines, and know well their 
cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy, and the 
following scene with Cromwell, where — instead 
of the metre of Shakespeare, whose secret is, 
that the thought constructs the tune, so that 
reading for the sense will best bring out the 
rhythm — here the lines are constructed on a 
given tune, and the verse has even a trace of 
pulpit eloquence. But the play contains, 
through all its length, unmistakable traits of 
Shakespeare's hand, and some passages, as 
the account of the coronation, are like auto- 
graphs. What is odd, the compliment to 
Queen Elizabeth is in the bad rhythm." In 
taking it for granted that in Henry VIII Shake- 
speare is to be seen altering an earlier piece 



THE QUESTION OF HENRY VIH 97 

of work, rather than working contemporane- 
ously with another dramatist, or allowing his 
own work to be altered, Emerson simply 
follows in the line of Malone's investigations 
into the construction of the three parts of 
Henry VI. It did not lie within his scope 
to investigate the matter further; the passage, 
indeed, in which he states his view, is a digres- 
sion from his main argument. In August 
of the same year Mr. James Spedding published 
in the Gentleman's Magazine a paper entitled 
"Wlio wrote Shakespeare's Hem\^\m"III?" in 
which he dealt at considerable length with the 
question of authorship. "I had heard it 
casually remarked," he says, ''by a man of 
first-rate judgment on such points [Tennyson] 
that many passages in Henry VIII were very 
much in the manner of Fletcher. ... I deter- 
mined upon this to read the play through with 
an eye to this especial point, and see whether 
any solution of the mystery would present 
itself. The result of my examination was a 
clear conviction that at least two different 
hands had been employed in the composition 
of Henry VIII, if not three; and that they had 
worked, not together, but alternately upon 



98 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

(.1 

distinct portions of it." On August 24, 1850, 
a letter appeared in Notes and Queries from 
Mr. Samuel Hickson (the writer of an investi- 
gation into the authorship of The Two Noble 
Kinsmen, pubhshed in the Westminster Review 
of April 1847) stating that he himself had 
made the same discovery as Mr. Spedding three 
or four years back, and desiring (he adds) 
*'to strengthen the argument of the writer 
in the Gentleman's Magazine, by recording the 
fact that I, having no communication with 
him, or kif">wledge of him, even of his name, 
should have arrived at exactly the same con- 
clusion as his own." In 1874 the New 
Shakespere Society republished Mr. Spedding's 
essay and Mr. Hickson's letter, supporting 
the theory of double authorship by Mr. 
Fleay's and Mr. Furnivall's application of 
certain further metrical tests. In a paper 
read before the New Shakspere Society, No- 
vember 13th, 1874, Professor J. K. Ingram 
expressed himself as not so fully convinced 
that the non-Fletcherian portion of the play 
was by Shakspeare as that the non-Shakespear- 
ian part was by Fletcher. ''In reading the 
(so-called) Shakspearian part of the play I 



THE QUESTION OF HENRY VIII 99 

do not often feel myself in contact with a 
mind of the first order. Still, it is certain that 
there is much in it that is like Shakspere, and 
some things that are worthy of him at his 
best; that the manner, in general, is more 
that of Shakspere than of any other con- 
temporary dramatist; and that the system of 
verse is one which we do not find in any other, 
whilst it is, in all essentials, that of Shak- 
spere's last period. I cannot name anyone 
else who could have written this portion of the 
play" {New Shakspere Society^ s Transactions, 
1874, p. 454). Finally, Mr. Robert Boyle, 
in an "Investigation into the Origin and 
Authorship of Henry VIII," read before the 
New Shakspere Society, January 16th, 1885, 
attempted to prove that Shakespeare had no 
share whatever in the play, but that the part 
formerly assigned to him was really written 
by Massinger, and that Massinger and Fletcher 
wrote the play in collaboration. Mr. Spedding 
had accepted the generally-received date of 
1612 or 1613, and suggested that the play may 
have been put together in a hurry on the occa- 
sion of the Princess Elizabeth's marriage 
(February, 1612-1613) ; Mr. Boyle contended 



100 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA ' 

that the play was not produced till 1616, 
probably not till 1617, and that it was written 
to supply the place of All is True (possibly 
Shakespeare's, possibly not) which was de- 
stroyed in the Globe fire of 1613. 

Such, in brief, are the main theories with 
regard to the various problems raised by this 
puzzling play. I have purposely avoided 
saying much as to the question of date, both 
because I think there is little to be said, and 
because this little is rather an inference from, 
than a support to, whatever theory of author- 
ship we may choose to follow. 

That Shakespeare, or that any single writer, 
did not write the whole of Henry VIII, seems 
to me (to take a first step) practically beyond 
a doubt. So much we can hardly fail to accept ; 
first, on account of the incoherence of the gen- 
eral action, the failure of the play to produce 
on us a single, calculated effect; secondly, 
on the even stronger evidence of the versifica- 
tion. As Hertzeberg remarks, Henry VIII is 
"a chronicle-history with three and a half 
catastrophes, varied by a marriage and a 
coronation pageant, ending abruptly with the 
birth of a child." Spedding rightly notes that 



THE QUESTION OF HENRY VHI 101 

''the effect of this play as a whole is weak and 
disappointing. The truth is that the interest, 
instead of rising towards the end, falls away 
utterly, and leaves us in the last act among 
persons whom we scarcely know, and events 
for which we do not care. . . . The greater 
part of the fifth act, in which the interest ought 
to be gathering to a head, is occupied with 
matters in which we have not been prepared 
to take any interest by what went before, and 
on which no interest is reflected by what comes 
after." It is not merely that there are certain 
defects in the construction : defects in construc- 
tion are to be found in nearly every play of 
Shakespeare. The whole play is radically 
wanting in both dramatic and moral coherence. 
Our sympathy is arbitrarily demanded and 
arbitrarily countermanded. We are expected 
to weep for the undeserved sorrows of Katha- 
rine in one act, and to rejoice over the triumph 
of her rival, the cause of all those sorrows, in 
another. ''The effect," as Spedding expres- 
sively puts it, "is much like that which 
would have been produced by the Winter^s 
Tale if Hermione had died in the fourth act 
in consequence of the jealous tyranny of 



102 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

Leontes, and the play had ended with the 
coronation of a new queen and the christen- 
ing of a new heir, no period of remorse inter- 
vening." That Shakespeare, not only in the 
supreme last period of his career, but at any 
point in that career at which it is possible that 
the play could have been written, should 
be supposed capable of a blunder so headlong, 
final, and self-annulling, is nothing less than an 
insult to his memory. It is difficult to believe 
that any single writer, capable of so much 
episodical power, could have produced a play 
in which the point of view is so constantly 
and so unintelligibly shifted. 

This is difficult, but it is impossible to 
beUeve that any single writer could have 
produced a play in which the versification obeys 
two perfectly distinct laws in perfectly distinct 
scenes and passages. The unanswerable ques- 
tion is: Did Shakespeare at any period of his 
life write verse in the metre of Wolsey's often- 
quoted soliloquy (iii. 2, 350-372)? If one may 
believe the evidence of one's ears, never; 
nor is the metre so admirable that we can 
suppose he would take the trouble to acquire 
it, lacking as it is in all that finer magic, 



THE QUESTION OF HENRY VIII 103 

in all that subtler faculty of expression which 
marked, and marked increasingly, his own 
verse. The versification of some portions of 
the play does undoubtedly bear a considerable 
resemblance to the later versification of Shake- 
speare. We have thus in one play verse which 
is like Shakespeare's and verse which is unlike 
Shakespeare's. The conclusion is inevitable: 
two writers must have been engaged upon it. 
Messrs. Spedding and Hickson agreed in divid- 
ing the play as follows. To the writer whose 
versification is like Shakespeare's (and whom 
they took to be Shakespeare) they assign i. 
1, 2; ii. 3, 4; iii. 2 (as far as line 203); and 
V. 1. The rest of the play they assign to the 
other author. Mr. Boyle, in his examination 
of the play, while substantially following this 
division, assigns to the Shakespeare-like author 
iv. 1 (rightly, as I think), and also adds to his 
share i. 4, lines 1-24, 64-108; ii. 1, lines 
1-53, 137-169; and v. 3, lines 1-113. Reading 
the remaining parts of the play, the parts writ- 
ten in the metre of that soHloquy of Wolsey, 
so markedly unlike that of Shakespeare, we 
find that the metre is as markedly similar to 
that of Fletcher. Compare with this passage 



104 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

the following typical passage from one of 
Fletcher's plays, The False One, ii. 1: 

I have heard too much; 
And study not with smooth shows to invade 
My noble mind as you have done my conquest. 
Ye are poor and open; I must tell you roundly, 
That man that could not recognise the benefits. 
The great and bounteous services of Pompey, 
Can never dote upon the name of Caesar. 
Though I had hated Pompey, and allowed his ruin, 
I gave you no permission to perform it. 
Hasty to please in blood are seldom trusty; 
And but I stand environ'd with my victories. 
My fortune never failing to befriend me, 
My noble strengths and friends about my person, 
I durst not trust you, nor expect a courtesy 
Above the pious love you show'd to Pompey. 
You have found me merciful in arguing with ye; 
Swords, hangmen, fires, destructions of all natures, 
Demolishments of kingdoms, and whole ruins. 
Are wont to be my orators. Turn to tears. 
You wretched and poor seeds of sunburnt Egypt; 
And now you have found the natm-e of a conqueror. 
That you cannot decline with all your flatteries, 
That when the day gives light will be himself still. 
Know how to meet his worth with humane covu-tesies. 
Go and embalm the bones of that great soldier; 
Howl round about his pile, fling on your spices, 
Make a Sabaean bed, and place this phoenix 
Where the hot sun may emulate his virtues. 
And draw another Pompey from his ashes, 
Divinely great, and fix him 'mongst the worthies. 



THE QUESTION OF HENRY VHI 105 

This gives, in an extreme form, those charac- 
teristics which peculiarly distinguish the verse 
of Fletcher, and which (it will be seen) dis- 
tinguish equally the passage of Henry VIII 
to which I have referred, and all those portions 
of the play already indicated; there is the 
same abundance of double and triple endings, 
the same fondness for an extra accented syl- 
lable at the end of a line (a characteristic which 
is inveterate in Fletcher, and of which scarcely 
an example is to be found in the work of any 
of his contemporaries), the same monotony, 
the same clash of metrical and sense emphasis. 
Emerson, in the passage already quoted, 
defines admirably the difference between this 
metre and that of Shakespeare; a difference 
which is indeed so obvious as to make defini- 
tion seem unnecessary. It may be doubted 
whether in the whole of Shakespeare there is 
such a line as this (iii. 2, 352) : 

This is the state of man : to-day he puts forth — 

where the double ending is composed of two 
equally accented syllables. Examples by the 
score could be cited at a moment's notice from 
any play of Fletcher's, and from Fletcher's 



106 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA ' 

plays alone. May we not therefore feel justi- 
fied in assigning to Fletcher (in the absence, 
be it understood, of any distinguishing Shake- 
spearian qualities in the characterization and 
the language) those portions of the play in 
which the versification is precisely like that 
of Fletcher and completely unlike that of 
Shakespeare or any other known dramatist? 

We have now to consider the authorship of 
the remaining part of the play, the more im- 
portant part, not only because it contains the 
famous trial-scene, but because the writer 
introduced, and doubtless sketched out, the 
various characters afterwards handled by 
himself and his coadjutor. Are these char- 
acters, we may ask first, worthy of Shake- 
speare, and do they recall his manner of han- 
dling? Is their language the Shakespearian 
language, the versification of their speeches 
the Shakespearian versification? Or do the 
characters, language, and versification seem 
more in the style of Massinger, or of any other 
writer? 

In looking at the characters in Henry VIII 
we must not forget that they were all found 
ready-made in the pages of Holinshed. The 



THE QUESTION OF HENRY VIII 107 

same might, to a certain extent, be said of all 
Shakespeare's historical plays; the difference 
in the treatment, however, is very notable. 
In Henry VIII Holinshed is followed blindly 
and slavishly; some of the most admirable 
passages of the play are taken almost word for 
word from the Chronicles] there are none of 
those illuminating touches by which Shake- 
speare is accustomed to transfigure his bor- 
rowings. Nor does Shakespeare content him- 
self with embellishing: he creates. Take, for 
example, Bolingbroke, of whose disposition 
Holinshed says but a few words; the whole 
character is an absolute creation. Shake- 
speare's fidelity to his authorities is not so 
great as to prevent him from rejecting material 
ready to his hand where such material is at 
variance with his own conception of a charac- 
ter. For example, Holinshed records a speech 
of Henry V before the battle. Shakespeare 
writes a new one, in marked contrast to it. 
Again, Holingshed gives a speech of Hotspur 
delivered shortly before the battle of Shrews- 
bury. Shakespeare puts quite other words 
and thoughts into Hotspur's mouth. In both 
cases Holinshed furnished a speech that might 



108 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

well have been turned into blank verse; never- 
theless, it was set aside. But in Henry VIII 
Holinshed is followed with a fidelity which is 
simply slavish. 

The character of Katharine, for instance, on 
which such lavish and unreasoning praise has 
been heaped, owes almost all its effectiveness 
to the picturesque narration of the Chronicles. 
There we see her, clearly outlined, an obviously 
practicable figure; and it cannot be said that 
we get a higher impression of her from the play 
than we do from the history. The dramatist 
has proved just equal to the occasion; he has 
taken the character as he found it, and, keep- 
ing always very close to his authority, he has 
produced a most admirable copy, transplant- 
ing rather than creating. To speak of the 
character of Katharine as one of the triumphs 
of Shakespeare's art seems to me altogether a 
mistake. The character is a fine one, and it 
seems, I confess, almost as far above Massinger 
as it is beneath Shakespeare. But test it for a 
moment by placing Katharine beside Her- 
mione. The whole character is on a distinctly 
lower plane of art : the wronged wife of Henry 
has none of the fascination of the wronged 



THE QUESTION OF HENRY VIII 109 

wife of Leontes; there are no magic touches. 
Compare the trial scene in Henry VIII 
(ii. 4) and the trial scene in The Winter's 
Tale (iii. 2) I should rather say contrast them, 
for I can see no possible comparison of the two. 
Katharine's speech is immeasurably inferior 
to Hermione's, alike as art and as nature. 
It has none whatever of that packed imagery, 
that pregnant expressiveness, that vividly 
metaphorical way of being direct, which gives 
its distinction to the speech of Hermione. It 
is, moreover, almost word for word from Holin- 
shed. As for the almost equally famous 
death scene, I can simply express my astonish- 
ment that anyone could have been found to 
say of it, with Johnson, that it is "above any 
other part of Shakespeare's tragedies, and 
perhaps above any scene of any other poet, 
tender and pathetic." Tender and pathetic it 
certainly is, but with a pathos just a little limp, 
if I may use the word, flaccid ahnost, though, 
thanks to the tonic draught of Holinshed, not 
so limp and flaccid as Fletcher often is. 

If Katharine is a little disappointing, Anne 
is an unmitigated failure. That she is meant 
to be attractive is evident from the remarks 



110 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

made about her in various parts of the play, 
in which we are told that she is " virtuous and 
well-deserving," that she is "a gallant creature 
and complete," that ''beauty and honour" 
are mingled in her, and the like. And what 
do we see? A shadow, a faint and unpleasing 
sketch, the outline of one of those slippery 
women whom Massinger so often drew. She 
would sympathize with the queen, and her 
words of sympathy are strained, unnatural in 
her; she is cunning, through all her affected 
primness (" For all the spice of your hypoc- 
risy," says the odious Old Lady to her); and 
in what we see of her at Wolsey's banquet she 
is merely frivolous. In all Shakespeare's work 
there is no such example of a character so 
marred in the making, so unintentionally de- 
graded (after Massinger' s inveterate manner) 
as this of Anne. I would rather think that 
Shakespeare began his career with Lavinia 
than that he ended it with Anne. 

Turning to the character of Henry VIII, we 
find a showy figure, who plays his part of king 
not without effect. Looking deeper, we find 
that there is nothing deeper to discover. The 
Henry of history is a puzzling character, but 



THE QUESTION OF HENRY VIII 111 

the Henry of a play should be adequately 
conceived and intelligibly presented. What- 
ever disguise he may choose to assume towards 
the men and women who walk beside him on 
the boards, to us he must be without disguise. 
As it is, we know no more than after reading 
Holinshed whether the Henry of the play 
believed or did not believe, or what partial 
belief he had, in those " scruples," for instance, 
to which he refers, not without a certain 
unction. He is illogical, insubstantial, the 
mere superficial presentment of a deeply inter- 
esting historical figure, who would, we may be 
sure, have had intense interest for Shakespeare, 
and to whom Shakespeare would have given 
his keenest thought, his finest workmanship. 
A greater opportunity still is lost in the case 
of Wolsey. We hear a great deal of his com- 
manding qualities, but where do we see them? 
Arrogance we see, and craft, but nowhere 
does he produce upon us that impression of 
tremendous power, of magnificence, in good 
and evil, which it is clearly intended that he 
should produce. Is it credible that the 
dramatist who, in the shape of a swoln and 
deluded Falstaff, drives in upon us the impres- 



112 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

sion of the man's innate power with every 
word that he utters, and through all his buf- 
fetings and disgraces, should, with every ad- 
vantage of opportunity, with such a figure, 
ready made to his hand, as Wolsey, have given 
us this merely formal transcript from Holin- 
shed, this ''thing of shreds and patches?" 
How dramatically would Shakespeare have 
worked the ascending fortunes of the man to a 
climax; with what crushing effect, and yet 
how inevitably, brought in the moment of 
downfall! As it is, the effect is at once trivial 
and spasmodic, and the famous soliloquies, 
even, when one looks at them as they really 
are, but fine rhetorical preachments, spoken 
to the gallery ; fine, rhetorical, moving, memo- 
rable, but not the epilogue of a broken fortune, 
the last words of a bitterness worse than death, 
as Shakespeare or as nature would have given 
them. One feels that there is no psychology 
underneath this big figure : it stands, and then 
it is doubled up by a blow; but one sees with 
due clearness neither why it stood so long 
nor why it fell so suddenly. The events 
happen, but they are not brought about 
by that subtle logic which, in Hamlet or in Lear, 



THE QUESTION OF HENRY VHI 113 

constructs the action out of the character, and 
so enables us to follow, to understand, every 
change, however sudden and unlooked-for, 
in the uncertain fortunes of a tormented human 
creature struggling with the powers of fate and 
of his own nature. 

Now all this, so incredible in Shakespeare, is 
precisely what we find again and again in his 
contemporaries, and nowhere more than in 
Fletcher and Massinger. In Shakespeare, 
never neglectful of the requirements of the 
stage, the picturesqueness is made to grow 
out of the real nature of things: Fletcher and 
Massinger, only too often, are ready to sacri- 
fice the strict logic of character to the momen- 
tary needs of a dramatic spectacle, the stage- 
interest of sudden reverses. And in all that 
I have been saying of the character-drawing 
which we see in this play, little has been said 
which would not lead us to assign this work, 
so far beneath Shakespeare, to such fine but 
imperfect dramatic poets as Fletcher and 
Massinger. 

I have spoken of the evidences of Fletcher's 
metre which we find in certain parts of the 
play, evidences which seem scarcely to admit 



114 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

of a doubt. But I confess that the metre and 
language of the non-Fletcherian portion do not 
seem to me by any means so clearly assign- 
able to Massinger. Massinger's verse is a 
close imitation of the later verse of Shake- 
speare; but it is an imitation which stops 
short at the end of no very lengthy a tether. 
The verse of the non-Fletcherian portion of 
Henry VIII rings neither true Shakespeare 
nor true Massinger, and I know of no other 
dramatist to whom it can be attributed. 
There are lines and passages which, if I came 
across them in an anonymous play, I should 
assign without hesitation to Massinger; there 
are also lines and passages to which I can recol- 
lect no parallel in all his works. Mr. Boyle, 
in his valuable paper already quoted, gives a 
certain number of "parallel passages" in 
support of the Massinger authorship, but I 
cannot say that they appear to me altogether 
conclusive. Nor is the argument from sup- 
posed historical allusions, by which he assigns 
the play to 1616 or 1617, a date which would 
favour the theory that Massinger and Fletcher 
wrote together, anything more than vaguely 
conjectural. As I have said before, we really 



\ » 



THE QUESTION OF HENRY VHI 115 

do not know when this play was written; 
there is nothing to forbid the assumption that 
it was a new play in 1613, there is nothing to 
forbid the assumption that it was not written 
till 1616 or 1617. The backward limit of 
date is indeed fixed by the characteristics of 
the metre; but the very slight evidence which 
identifies the play of Henry VIII as we have 
it, with the play All is True, which was being 
performed on the occasion of the Globe fire, 
is not conclusive enough to stand in the way of 
a later date, should a later date seem to be 
demanded by other considerations. We are 
thus free to deal with the question of author- 
ship entirely on internal evidence. The like- 
ness between the verse of Shakespeare and 
such verse as: 

Turn me away and let the foul'st contempt 
Shut door upon me, and so give me up 
To the sharpest kind of justice 

is so close as to seem almost beyond imitation. 
Yet of two difficulties, is it not easier to 
imagine someone coming so near to Shake- 
speare's technique in verse than Shakespeare 
falling so far below the level of his imagination? 
I have already given my reasons for believing 



il6 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

that Shakespeare wrote neither the whole nor 
a part of the play, and that Fletcher did write 
certain portions of it. But I cannot hold with 
any assurance that the second author has yet 
been discovered. It seems not impossible that 
this second author was Massinger. 

1890. 



VIII. ROMEO AND JULIET 

The play of Romeo and Juliet is like a 
piece of music, and it is the music which 
all true lovers have heard in the air since 
they began listening to one another's voices. 
Here, for once, youth becomes conscious of 
itself, and of the charm which is passing out 
of the world with its passing. A young man 
wrote this wise and passionate eulogy of 
youth; and it is that contemporaneous heat 
of blood in it which has kept the names of 
these two young lovers alive in men's minds 
as the perfect exemplars of unspoiled love. 
Love in youth is an emotion that may well 
seem exaggerated ''to animals that do not 
love"; and if the passion of Romeo and 
Juliet is at times as clamorous as Italian love 
in Italian operas, that leaves it perhaps all 
the more like the thing which it renders so 
frankly. In Ferdinand and Miranda, in Per- 
dita and Florizel, there is a more subtly human 
poetry than in Romeo or Juliet; only we 

117 



118 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

remember that for its poetry, while we remem- 
ber this as if it were love itself. 

Compared with one of Shakespeare's later 
women, with Imogen, for instance, Juliet 
is but a sketch; she lives, but only in her 
love; as Romeo, indeed, but for his love, in 
any hasty and ardent youth out of whom 
passion strikes unlooked-for sparks of imagina- 
tion. But it is precisely by this concentration 
upon the development and consequences of 
one impulse, irresistible and yet ineffectual, 
that Shakespeare has given us, not this or 
that adorable person who, among other things, 
loves, but two lovers, who, besides loving, 
just remember to live. They have but one 
desire, and this they attain; so that they 
must be said to have succeeded in life. But 
they have no force over circumstances; they 
bend to their will only the consent of a few 
hours. 

In Antony and Cleopatra, in which we 
see the other side of love, played out before 
the world on the stage of the world, the two 
eager and calculating lovers have the larger 
part of a lifetime given to them to love and 
hate in. This play, as Coleridge has noted, 



ROMEO AND JULIET 119 

"should be perused in mental contrast with 
Romeo and Juliet^ It is indeed in these two 
plays that Shakespeare expounds the whole 
art of love. It may be that he has left some- 
thing over; for there is another garden 
besides Juliet's in which Sakuntala walked; 
and Isolde, in Wagner's music, has added a 
cry to ''the desire of the w^oman for the 
desire of the man." But the whole art, cer- 
tainly, is in those two plays. Romeo and Juliet 
is the breviary of lovers who have loved young 
and at first sight. 

Romeo, when we first see him, is already 
in love with love; but Juliet has learned 
nothing yet from experience. To be married, 
says she, is '' an honor that I dream not of." 
Love has not yet been thought of; marriage, 
about which she has heard her mother talk, 
is a grave thing, an honour. When she sees 
Romeo she gives him her heart as simply 
as her hand; innocent, unshamed nature 
speaks out of her mouth with the simplicity 
of a child saying, I am tired, I am hungry. 
She is as eager to be loved as if she knew 
that her moments in the world were counted, 
and that there is no other earthly flame which 



120 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

can give a little light and heat on this side 
of the grave. Turn from that lyric scene in 
the garden to the scene in which Cleopatra 
enters leaning on the shoulder of Antony, 
and saying her slow, experienced first words, 

If it be love indeed, tell me how much. 

She has set bounds to her passion, and a 
narrow limit to love. Love, to her, is hedged 
in by the senses, and these are mortal. But 
Juliet, saying the words as her instinct teaches 
them to her, can say, truly: 

My bounty is as boundless as the sea, 
My love as deep; the more I give to thee, 
The more I have, for both are infinite! 

The unrealised idea of love can suggest to 
her neither reservation nor any ending; she 
responds to it with the entire energy of her 
being. 

Love, in Romeo and in Juliet, is first an 
inspiration, then a religion, then a madness. 
Both awaken as if from a dream, and the 
awakening is to that true reality which 
henceforth shuts them off from the world, 
as if in a deeper dream. The first love-scene 



ROMEO AND JULIET 121 

in the garden is a duet of two astonishments. 
Each is amazed that such a moment can find 
them, and that they can be ready for such a 
moment. Instantly it becomes incredible to 
them that anything else could have happened. 
They have only to exchange hearts. But 
that has been done already. When? When 
Romeo leaves his wife after their one night 
of love it is with a profound peace that they 
say over to one another that divine auhade 
which the lark and the nightingale seem to say 
for them. Death is behind them and before 
them, and Juliet, looking down on her lover 
as he lingers in the garden, sees him, with an 
"ill-divining soul." 

As one dead in the bottom of a tomb. 

To the end their love is a sacred madness; it 
fills every word that they are to speak, as it 
has filled every corner of their being. It exalts 
and purifies their words with its own intel- 
lectual purity, as it has transfigured their 
souls; imagination comes into the verse, 
sweeping it clean of fancy. It is not the same 
Romeo as the gentle lover of the garden 
("I would I were thy bird"), or even as 



122 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

the grave and tender lover of Juliet's chamber 
("How is't, my soul? let's talk, it is not day"), 
who rises to a kind of triumph as he looks on 
the dead body, as he thinks: 

For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes 

This vault a feasting presence full of light. 

I will stay with thee; 

And never from this palace of dim night 

Depart again: here, here will I remain 

With worms that are thy chambermaids; 0, here 

Will I set up my everlasting rest; 

And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars 

From this world- wearied flesh. 

Lovers live by apprehension; love makes 
every man superstitious; and throughout the 
play there is a continual muttering of omens 
and presages, like warning notes striking 
through love-music. We are warned from the 
beginning: 

These violent delights have violent ends. 
Therefore love moderately; long love does so. 
Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable. 

Just before he is to hear the news that Juliet 
is dead, Romeo has dreamed an ambiguous 
dream, from which he draws comfort: 

My dreams presage some joyful news at hand. 



ROMEO AND JULIET 123 

Hearing of her death, he has but one thing 
to say, for a calamity so immovable has struck 
him atheist : 

Is it even so? then I deny you, stars! 

In this play, in which love seems to be 
everything, and nothing else to matter, Shake- 
speare has created a whole world around these 
two central figures, and by so doing he has 
given us, not love in the abstract of a brief 
lyric, but love living its own deaf and blind 
life in a world busied about other matters. 
The action takes place during five days, and 
in this precipitancy we see Shakespeare's 
aim at giving us the essential part of love, love 
in its intensity, not its duration. He begins 
sharply in the streets, with that "motley dance 
of all ranks and ages to one tune," as Coleridge 
says, "as if the horn of Huon had been playing 
behind the scenes." The atmosphere is pre- 
pared; we see hate, Italy, and the heat: 
For now these hot days is the mad blood stirring. 

After the fighting with swords comes the 
fighting of wits. As the swords were drawn 
idly, for trivial reasons, and by those who had 
no personal share in the hereditary feud of two 



124 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

houses, so Mercutio and the other talkers 
talk for effect, ''by art as well as nature," 
and only then seem to themselves, as they put 
it, "sociable." This antic and fantastic talk, 
part Euphues, part fashion of the court, 
part parody, which, if it has lost some of the 
bloom of its youth, keeps nimble to this day, 
may be contrasted with the crueler banter of 
the Restoration: each images the lighter 
*'form and pressure" of an age, and in only one 
was there room for poetry. There is youth 
in Shakespeare's gaiety of humor in this 
prelude to tragedy; it is as if his genius had 
not grown wholly accustomed to itself, and 
must turn every amble into a steeplechase, 
so eager was it for display, for the mere excite- 
ment of exercise. 

And outside this society of wits and brawlers, 
probably so true to the circumstances of Shake- 
speare's time, there is another homelier group : 
the old Capulets and the immortal Nurse. 
The others come, glitter, and fade out; for, 
when true passions have begun to work, these 
mummers and jesters have no further place. 
But the people about Juliet are set there for 
the sake of their fixed opposition to her quite 



ROMEO AND JULIET 123 

otherwise fixed resolve. They are age, cus- 
tom, the family, the vulgar; they are the world 
itself, in its lumbering journey along its own 
road. Shakespeare, after his wont, has been 
prodigal with them; the comic creation of 
the Nurse is as full of his genius as the tragic 
creation of Juliet. Indeed, when he makes 
her speak, she speaks faultlessly, and is never 
out of key; while Juliet often speaks for love 
or for Shakespeare, in the manner of a poet 
not yet willing to sacrifice the poetry to the 
drama, and not yet able to fuse drama and 
poetry in one. 

In the Nurse we have the satiric after- 
part of Greek drama, brought boldly into 
the midst of the tragic action; in Friar 
Laurence we have one aspect of the chorus, 
that aspect in which it fulfilled Schlegers 
partial definition, and became "the ideal 
spectator." The one point fixed, where all 
else is turning, he represents philosophy among 
the passions, judging them, humouring them, 
and helpless and disturbing enough when he has 
succeeded in setting them moving to his 
own pattern of abstract wisdom. The Nurse 
and the Capulets, who would also fetter a 



123 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

live passion, or teach it the direction in which 
it should grow, are seen even more helplessly 
at its mercy. It is with an immense tragic 
gaiety that Shakespeare shows us this ancient 
busybody hobbling after her mistress, run- 
ning her errands and the errands of her mother; 
looking wisely after affairs, as she and the 
mother suppose; with all the instincts of the 
procuress, rendered harmless by the invincible 
innocence of Juliet. She is the first of those 
pets and preachers of iniquity who came to 
ripe philosophy in Falstaff and to the scaven- 
ger's wisdom in Thersites. 

It is one of the signs of that judgment which 
was part of the genius of Shakespeare that he 
should have begun by working on what lay 
nearest to his hand, and with the materials 
which he was sure that he had in his posses- 
sion. It is probable that Romeo and Juliet 
was written a few years after the two narra- 
tive poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape 
of Lucrece; and in these poems we see Shake- 
speare exercising himself, so to speak, by giving 
the most elaborate expression to sensual and 
to heroically domestic love. In the comedies 
there is scarcely a perceptible note of prepara- 



ROMEO AND JULIET 127 

tion. Love is a game, a sentiment, a thing of 
fashion, preference, polite employment; it 
is worn as an ornament, the heart on the 
sleeve wholly as a motive of decoration. 
We are no nearer to genuine passion than 
is Romeo when he laments over the cold- 
ness of Rosaline. ''Night's candles" are not 
yet ''burnt out"; the lover has not yet 
said, "It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!" 
But the two poems lay down a kind of founda- 
tion, solid in the earth, on which to raise this 
chapel of romantic love. It is through the 
senses that Shakespeare has found out love, 
and finding it, he has not plucked the flower 
away from the rest. The passion of Romeo 
for Juliet and of Juliet for Romeo is a part 
of nature; not a whim, not a dream, not a 
sick fancy bred in the brain, but nature 
itself. It is sex, although the idea of sex is 
overflowed by a divine oblivion; Romeo sighs 
after "the white wonder of dear Juliet's hand," 
and Juliet's is the most honest, the most 
day-light passion that has ever been spoken 
in words; it speaks as straight, feels as deeply, 
and adds as much courtesy to passion as the 
heroic love which takes on chivalry without 



128 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

quitting nature in Gottfried of Strasburg's 
Tristan und Isolde. 

Although Romeo and Juliet contains certain 
lines and passages which are as mature in 
imagination and as brilliant in execution as 
anything which Shakespeare ever wrote, the 
main part of the play has all the characteristics 
of his early, somewhat formal and somewhat 
exuberant, period. There are not only rhymes 
in couplets, but crossed rhymes, in fixed 
stanzas; the blank verse is often monoto- 
nous, line following line, for five lines at a 
time, with unvarying pauses; sometimes it is 
as bad as 

Away to heaven, respective lenity, 
And fire-eyed fury be my conduct now! 

It can rave like ''Jeronimo," or split hairs 
with the painful ingenuity of the period, as 
in Juliet's series of puns on the word "Ay" 
and the letter "I." The writing is often self- 
conscious; the narrative passages have a 
certain stiffness. We see Shakespeare still 
unwilling to trust wholly to his ear, to abandon 
himself frankly to his imagination. In the 
midst of some of his most splendid writing he 



ROMEO AND JULIET 129 

seems to clieck himself, and stops to write-in 
a passage on some accepted model. 

There is a charm of its own in immaturity, 
and, for the most part, when it is the imma- 
turity of a vast genius, some rare beauty, 
growing out of the mere happy accidents 
of growth, which must be lost with ripeness. 
Here we have a whole spring-tide of buds; 
*' spring with its odors, its flowers, and its 
transiency," as Coleridge says, in that ex- 
quisite passage in which he turns the play into 
an allegory of spring. It is the first play in 
which Shakespeare touches maturity, but he 
touches it only, and relapses into the defects 
and graces that belong to an incomparable 
promise. There are whole passages, like the 
lament of the Nurse and the Capulets over 
Juliet, which are purely lyrical, or like answer- 
ing music. The auhade again is frankly music 
and a song. Juliet's monologue before drink- 
ing the sleep-drink is the first of those many 
curious questionings of death, in which Claudio 
is^to lead the way to Hamlet. It has been 
said by Hazlitt, with too hasty an emphasis 
that ''Romeo is Hamlet in love." There are 
touches in him of what was probably most like 



130 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

Shakespeare in Hamlet; that is to say, of 
passionate absorption, of a will which seems 
infirm because it is too much at the mercy 
of deeper questionings; but if Romeo some- 
times speaks for Shakespeare, a little aside 
from his character, Hamlet is a wholly con- 
sistent part of Shakespeare, detached finally 
from his creator. 

It is natural that Romeo and Juliet should 
always have been a favorite with actors. It 
is full of pictures; it appeals to the most 
popular of the emotions; its poetry is only 
too well fitted for recitation. There never 
was an actress under fifty who did not feel her- 
self a Juliet, or an actor under sixty who did 
not see himself as Romeo. For once, Shake- 
speare wrote great poetry which the mob 
could not but love, could not but find itself 
at home with. Juliet is the Englishman's 
symbol for Helen; and Shakespeare has made 
her the name for virtue in love, fatal indeed 
to herself and to Romeo, but innocently fatal, 
and, unlike Helen, healing by death the 
discord which has not been stirred up by her 
life. We are far from '' the couple of un- 
fortunate lovers" of Brooke's Tragicall History 



ROMEO AND JULIET 131 

of Romeus and Juliet, ''written first in Italian 
by Bandell, and nowe in Englishe by Ar. 
Br.," one of Shakespeare's sources, whom 
Brooke hastily shows us "finally, by all 
means of unhonest life, hasting to most un- 
happy death." "The two hours' traffic of 
our stage" was, to Shakespeare, concerned with 
"the misad ventured piteous overthrows" of 
"a pair of star-crossed lovers": he lays the 
blame on no one, not even on fate, giving us 
the story as it happened; 

For never was a story of more woe 
Than this of JuKet and her Romeo, 

he adds quite simply. 

1903. 



IX. CYMBELINE 

If it could be assumed, with any strong 
probability, that Cymbeline, which ends the 
First Folio, was really the last play which 
Shakespeare wrote, several difficulties which 
present themselves in connection with it 
might be resolved at once. It contains one 
of the most perfect of Shakespeare's women, 
two gallant boys, a notable villain, with rapid, 
summarising studies in jealousy, a murderous 
queen, a royal clown, done as if from memory, 
or on second thoughts. There are pastoral 
scenes in it which can only be compared with 
the pastoral scenes in The Winter's Tale; and 
they are written in verse of the same free and 
happy cadence. Yet the play is thrown to- 
gether loosely, rather as if it were a novel, to 
be read, than a play, to be acted. The action 
is complicated here, neglected there. A scene 
of sixteen lines is introduced to say that the 
tribunes are required to raise more forces for 
the war, and that Lucius is to be general. 

132 



CYMBELINE 133 

The last scene is five hundred lines long, and 
has to do as much business as all the rest of the 
play. The playwright seems no longer to have 
patience with his medium; it is as if his inter- 
est had gone out of it, and he were using it as 
the only makeshift at hand. 

Most artists, at the end of their careers, 
become discontented with the form in which 
they have worked. They have succeeded 
through obedience to this form, but it seems to 
them that a rarer success lies, uncaptured, 
outside those limits. They are tempted by 
what seems lawless in life itself; by what is 
certainly various and elastic in life. They are 
impatient with the slowness of results, with 
their rigidity, inside those inexorable limits. 
The technique which they have perfected 
seems to them too perfect; something cries 
out of chains, and they would set the voice, 
or Ariel, free. 

That spirit, I think, we see in the later plays 
of Shakespeare, in which not only does metre 
dissolve and reform, in some new, fluctuant 
way of its own, but the whole structure becomes 
vaporous, and floats out through the solid 
walls of the theatre. Even The Tempest, 



134 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

when I have seen it acted, lost the greater part 
of its magic, and was no longer that " cloud- 
capt " promontory in "faery seas forlorn," 
the last foothold of human life on the edge of 
the world. What sense of loss do we feel when 
we see Othello acted? Othello has nothing 
to lose; the playwright has never forgotten the 
walls of his theatre. In Cymheline he is frankly 
tired of them. 

Cymheline is a romance, made out of Holin- 
shed, and Boccaccio, and perhaps nursery 
stories, and it is that happiest kind of romance, 
which strays harmlessly through tragic in- 
cidents in which only the bad people come to 
grief. All the time things seem to be knotting 
themselves up inextricably; every one is 
playing at cross purposes with every one, as 
in a children's game, immensely serious to the 
children; and one is allowed the thrill which 
comes out of other people's dangers, and the 
pleasant consciousness that everything will 
be all right in the end. There are plays of 
Shakespeare which are almost painfully real, 
in their so much more than reality; this 
play, even in its most desperate complication, 
is never allowed to come too close to us for 



CYMBELINE 135 

pleasure. We are following the track of a 
romance, and in countries where no one is 
sick or sorry beyond measure. 

The two central figures of the romance are 
Posthumus and Imogen, and it is those two 
unlucky lovers who wander through the forest, 
seeking and flying from each other, along 
roads chosen mockingly for them by the fate 
which lies in things as they are. Posthumus 
is a new kind of hero of romance. He is a 
showy gentleman, who has the gift of winning 
every one to his side, including Imogen. 

By her selection may be truly read 
What kind of man he is, 

says the First Gentleman in the first scene, 
plausibly, but not with knowledge : his praises 
are to be taken at the valuation of common 
rumour. Married to an incomparable woman, 
Posthumus has never known her. To doubt 
her is not to have known her. The jealousy 
of Posthumus is circumstantial, a jealousy 
of dull senses, to which the imagination has 
never spoken. He doubts her at the first 
rumour of mere coincidence. I should not 
say doubts; he has not a doubt; her dishonor 



136 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

is palpable to him. He hugs the certainty, 
driving it into him like a knife in a foe's hand. 
He will not wait to know all that can be said 
against her; he is convinced from the first. 
Rage makes him voluble, and then inarticulate; 
"I'll do something," is all that he is quite 
sure of. He orders her death, and when he is 
told that she is dead, he cries: 

I'll die 
For thee, Imogen, even for whom my life 
Is, every breath, a death. 

He is always crying out like a child or a mad- 
man, always against sense, too soon or too 
late. He is the slave of the moment, always 
in its power for evil; and it is against all his 
endeavours, and against all probability, that 
he ends happily, having failed in every attempt 
to destroy his own happiness. That, perhaps, 
is the irony, as much as the mercy, of the 
play. 

Of all Shakespeare's women Imogen is the 
manliest and womanliest. All may say of her, 
as each man says of the woman whom he loves, 
that for him she is faultless, whatever faults 
may be seen in her by others. She is a 
woman to make virtue its own reward; the 



CYMBELINE 137 

"infinite variety" of the wicked seems to lurk 
in her under some saintly disguise. If English- 
men can point to this picture of an English- 
woman, and say that it is true to nature, 
nothing remains to be said in praise of our 
women. It is in her simplicity that Imogen 
is greatest. Nothing is too hard for her to do 
easily, nor does it ever occur to her to hesi- 
tate. She puts on boy's clothes without a 
thought of sex; and when, at the end of the 
play, she finds her husband again, repentant 
and ready to receive her, she forgets her 
disguise, and runs to him, to be thrust away 
by the inevitable blunderer. She has humour, 
a witty readiness of speech, exquisitely alert 
and to the point. Only once does Shake- 
speare burden her with those forced metaphors 
and that unnatural ingenuity of discourse 
which blemish so many of his pages. This is 
in the scene where she finds the headless 
body of Cloten in the clothes of Posthumus, 
and takes the dead man for her husband. 
Those dreadful lines about — 

His foot Mercurial; his Martial thigh; 

The brawns of Hercules : but his Jovial face — 

Murder in heaven? — How — 'Tis gone — 



138 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

are nowhere exceeded in Shakespeare for sheer 
unsuitability. Else, Imogen is a model of 
speech as of honour, justice, and mercy. And, 
though unbreakable, she has that woman's 
flexibility which carries her easily through 
terrifying adventures; she can find herself 
nowhere where she is not at home; her spirit 
is always (as Cymbeline says of her, when, 
at the end, 

Posthumus anchors upon Imogen, 

having learned trust at last) a kind of 

harmless lightning hitting 
Each object with a joy. 

Round these two lovers, on their difficult 
way through the entanglements of the story, 
are grouped one or two brave companions and 
a motley company of hinderers. Of these the 
chief is lachimo. lachimo is the gentlemanly 
villain through vanity. His whole intelligence 
is not let out to evil, as with lago; he enter- 
tains evil unawares, finding some unsuspected 
kinship there. He believes in his power over 
women, perhaps rather because he holds them 
lightly than because he prizes himself highly. 



CYMBELINE 139 

He has probably had experiences in Italy which 
have seemed to prove the justice of his esti- 
mate. The Englishwoman, though a new 
country for him, awakes none of his sus- 
picions. It is his creed that all women are 
alike ; only, that some have not been tempted. 
He has smiled at the confidence of husbands; 
Posthumus is franker than the others, that is 
all. He fully expects to win his wager. 

After he has talked with Imogen for a few 
minutes, he realises that the wager is lost, 
if it is to be won honestly. He does not seri- 
ously tempt her: he makes his few orna- 
mental passes, and drops the foil; with finesse, 
after all, convincing her of the innocence of his 
intentions. His vanity, doubtless, is wounded ; 
and it is really his vanity, alert to defend itself, 
which sets his "Italian blood" to ''operate" 
so instantly the dishonourable trick of the 
coffer. 

To the Italian, treachery has always been 
something of a fine art. Machiavelli taught 
it to princes, and not a gipsy could be cleaner 
of conscience after a lie than the Neapolitan 
of to-day. To have lied successfully is to 
have shown one's ability, much more subtly 



140 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

than if the struggle had been an open one, 
strength against strength. lachimo is a study 
in the Italian temperament, faultlessly in- 
dicated, until his vehemence of remorse at the 
end of the play brings him to a good end, 
perhaps not so much in the Italian manner. 

The Queen, with her useless poisons which 
harm no one, belongs to Shakespeare's series 
of wicked queens, most of them constructed 
on much the same pattern, but leading upward 
to a masterpiece in Lady Macbeth. Cymbe- 
line's Queen is, so far as her action is concerned, 
a busy-body, a meddler; her intentions are 
criminal, but all she really does is to provide 
Imogen with a sleeping-draught. She pulls 
some of the strings of the play, herself some- 
thing of a puppet. Shakespeare wants the 
wicked stepmother of all the legends, and he 
gives us a wicked stepmother who would fit 
into any of them. 

Her son, Cloten, the bullying fool, is one of 
Shakespeare's mockeries of the gentleman by 
birth who is scarcely a man by wits. Shake- 
speare was no flatterer of the people; he 
respected tyrants, he loved the pomp of kings. 
But in Cloten he shows us one of the rags 



CYMBELINE 141 

which may go to the making of that pomp, 
hardly laughing as he holds it out; all the 
braveries of the world have that side to them. 
Here and there he gives the pitiable thing a 
few sound words to say; on "our saltwater 
girdle," for instance, or the "If Caesar can hide 
the sun from us with a blanket, or put the moon 
in his pocket." Commentators have seen 
arguments in these generous lendings for sup- 
posing that the play was written partly at one 
time and partly at another; for how, they say, 
can the "mere fool" of the first act be "by no 
means deficient in manliness" in the third? 
It is part of Shakespeare's art to make even 
stupidity carry divine messages. Even this, 
the muddiest of his dolts, can transmit heroism 
by mistake. 

That "mountainous country with a cave," 
in Wales, on which Cloten intruded, to his 
destruction, is the scenery of the most bracing 
scene in Shakespeare. Here we breathe moun- 
tain air, and are among natures as free and 
healthy. These folk of the high rocks, with 
their princely manners, their high natural 
courtesy, live courtly lives in the open air, and 
attend with ceremony upon every action. 



142 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

Shakespeare is careful to explain that the 
two boys are none of ''nature's gentlemen," 
but princely by birth, though brought up not 
to know it; and that the old man is really 
a great lord in exile. He bids us look on what 
is intrinsic in noble descent, after having 
seen how that too, like all natural forces, can 
be flawed in a Cloten. Guiderius and Arvira- 
gus are indeed brothers to Imogen, tempered 
in the same steel. They are to other men 
almost what she is to other women. She has 
been unspoilt by civilisation; they, untouched 
by it. 

It is around this old man and these delight- 
ful boys that most of what is best in the play, 
most after Shakespeare's heart, we may be 
sure, takes place. Lyric beauty, not only 
in the incomparable dirge, fills these scenes with 
enchantment. Hardly in The Winter's Tale 
are there tenderer things said about flowers; 
nowhere are there more joyous things said 
about light, air, and the gentleness and energy 
of mere life in the sun and wind. And, 
always, blithely and instinctively in the two 
boys, with the gravity of experience in the 
old man, there is that nobility of soul which is 



CYMBELINE 143 

perhaps the part of Shakespeare's genius which 
grew most steadily to the last. 

His feeling for nature, also, grew or matured 
steadily. Shakespeare loved, no doubt, the 
woods of Arden and the forest ways of The 
Midsummer Night's Dream. He could play 
with them, for happy, sufficient purposes of 
his own. But it was not till his work was 
ending, and he had gone through the world, 
weighing it and judging it, and making it 
over again after almost its own miraculous 
pattern of life, that he came to feel the earth. 
As his art tired, we may think, of the play- 
house, so his nature, which had been content 
with cities, cried out for something which was 
not in cities. The open air, the sea, the fields, 
the hills, came to mean to him something 
which they had never meant. 

The ground that gave them first has them again, 

he can say, in Cymheline, of the dead, with a 
profound sense of the earth, and of our roots 
there. 

In Cymheline, as in all Shakespeare's later 
plays, the writing is for the most part moulded 
upon the thought, with a closeness very dif- 



144 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

ferent from the draped splendours of the 
earlier work. It is often condensed into a kind 
of hardness, it would say too much in every 
word; but it allows itself no other license. 
Often, in this play, it is chary of occasions for 
fine writing by the way. Take, for instance, 
the soliloquy of Posthumus in prison (V. 4). 
Compare it with Claudio's shuddering pre- 
vision of death and of the ''thrilling regions of 
thick-ribbed ice" in Measure for Measure; 
with Hamlet's reasoning in the dark of a sensi- 
tive limagination, fearful of uncertainties. 
Both are quick with feeling; each is the 
outcry of a naked human soul, alone with the 
fear of death. But Posthumus, who is willing 
to die, and who believes that "there are none 
want eyes to direct them the way I am going 
but such as wink and will not use them," 
argues coldly with himself, in his only half- 
hearted invocation of the gods. The solilo- 
quy is a masterpiece of that difficult kind of 
writing which has to wring a kind of emotion 
out of the absence of emotion in the speaker. 
It is packed with thought, with ingenuities 
of argument, precisely in keeping with the 
situation. 



CYMBELINE 145 

In the speeches of Imogen there are the same 
clearness, simplicity, and packed meanings of 
a singularly direct kind. That soliloquy before 
the cave of Belarius, beginning 

I see a man's life is a tedious one, 

is, like the soliloquy of Posthumus, all made up 
of little sentences, each half a line long, 
springing naturally and unexpectedly out of 
the last half line, in that way which Coleridge 
notes as characteristic of Shakespeare, ''just 
as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum 
of its own body, and seems forever twisting 
and untwisting its own strength." There is 
scarcely a figure of speech; the poetry seems 
too much in earnest, too eager to say definite 
things directly. It is poetry made out of mere 
thinking aloud, with all the starts and incon- 
sequences of actual thinking. One of the 
speeches is the most breathless in Shakespeare. 
In the mountain scenes, the verse has not 
only lyric beauty, but an austere quality which 
keeps just so much of splendour as can be at the 
same time grave and subdued. Rhetoric has 
all gone out of the verse, nothing is loud or 
showy any longer; there is a new aim at that 



146 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

last refinement in which strength comes dis- 
guised, and beauty seems a casual stranger. 
The verse itself has been broken, as it has to be 
broken over again in every age, as soon as it 
has come to perfection, and hardened there. 
Read a speech of Imogen after a speech of 
Juliet, and it will seem to you, at first sight, 
that Imogen is speaking almost prose, while 
Juliet is certainly singing poetry. It is in that 
apparent approach to the form of prose that 
verse finally becomes its most authentic self. 
Juliet has her few notes, and no more, her 
formal tunes; while Imogen can set the whole 
of Shakespeare's brain to a music as various 
and uncapturable as the wind. 

1907. 



X. TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 

It is probable that in this play, the most 
tragical of all comedies and the most comical 
of all tragedies, Shakespeare for once wrote 
to please himself; and, though we cannot 
take literally the publisher's note to the 
Second Quarto, that ''you have here a new 
play, never staled with the stage, never clap- 
per-clawed with the palms of the vulgar," it 
is not likely that what we now read is precisely 
what the King's Majesty's Servants acted at 
the Globe Theatre. What they acted, and 
what we now read, was certainly not all from 
the hand of Shakespeare. The Prologue, 
which appears for the first time in the Second 
Quarto. 

A prologue armed, but not in confidence 
Of author's pen or actor's voice, 

has the cumbrous bombast of a thing made for 

the occasion; and the concluding scenes of the 

play, in which Dry den rightly saw "nothing 

147 



'148 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

but a confusion of drums and trumpets, ex- 
cursions and alarms," have much the same 
note of forced and laboriously measured writ- 
ing. They are not like Shakespeare's writing 
at any period; they may possibly belong 
to some rough earlier play on the subject, 
from which Shakespeare, in his easy fashion, 
was content to take over untouched fragments, 
together with some of the original framework. 
The play as we have it, even apart from these 
doubtful scenes, is uncertainly constructed, 
and betrays the workmanship of different 
periods. What we know of its date con- 
firms the suspicion that Shakespeare may have 
worked at it after its first rough completion. 
The two quartos, identical but for the new 
title-page and preface of the second, were 
published in 1609; but as early as 1599, in 
the satirical play Histriomastix, there is an 
obvious allusion to a scene in a Troilus and 
Cressida which is coupled with a pun on 
"shake" and "spear." In 1603 there is 
an entry in the Stationers' Register relating 
to James Roberts's unsuccessful attempt to 
"get sufficient authority" for the printing of 
"the book of Troilus and Cressida'^; in Janu- 



TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 149 

ary, 1609, the publication of the Quarto is 
entered. More than one partial revision, at 
any time during those ten years, with the 
possible intrusion of the meddling hand of the 
Prologue-writer, would account for much of 
what seems difficult, at first sight, to account 
for in the play as we have it. If we accept 
the hypothesis of an earlier play, not Shake- 
speare's, there may have been some clearing 
away, as well as developing and deepening, 
of the play as it was first acted by the King's 
Servants. I can imagine the deeper intention 
coming gradually into his own work, as he 
went over it, with some inattentive impatience 
towards those parts which had still to carry 
the original meaning, the main weight of the 
story. Throughout there are ragged ends of 
action, with one discrepancy in fact between 
the second and the third scene of Act I., and 
a transposition, by the printers of the First 
Folio, of a rhyming tag from the end of 
the play to the end of the third scene of the 
last act, as if that had once been the end of 
the play. Lines are left in careless lengths, 
now too short and now too long, as if parts had 
been revised without regard to their context. 



150 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

The difference between the formal rhymed 
couplets of some scenes and the free and 
weighty blank verse of others is the difference 
between one period and another of Shake- 
speare's technique. Some of the speeches, 
written in the later style, are the longest in 
Shakespeare. 

Troilus and Cressida is a kind of Don 
Quixote, in which it is even more difficult 
to disentangle the burlesque from the serious 
element. The first aim of Cervantes was to 
ridicule the folly of courtly romances, to 
*' laugh Spain's chivalry away," so far as 
the extravagant facts of chivalry were con- 
cerned. But on the way he laughed at a 
thousand other things which are now of more 
interest to the world, and he made his scare- 
crow hero one of the most sympathetic victims 
of romance; the eternal idealist, lovable and 
ridiculous and lamentable and heroic, and the 
sport of a rough world which is, after all, 
always his servant. Shakespeare takes the 
story of the fall of Troy, the commonplace 
of poets and romance-writers, a legend almost 
as sacred as the Bible, and he makes it, in 
his parody of it, a parable of the world. 



TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 151 

Troilus and Cressida is an assaying of 
accepted values, and Shakespeare takes the 
two prime heroisms, love and glory (the two 
fights for honour), and shows them to us 
through the eyes of Thersites: ''Still wars and 
lechery! nothing else holds fashion." In this 
picture we see how like we are at our highest 
to the beasts that perish. Here is Troy, the 
city of the world's desire; Helen, the desire 
of the world; the mighty Agamemnon; the 
wise Ulysses; the hero of heroes, Achilles; 
Ajax, the bravest of men; Hector, Cassandra, 
Andromache; and only Hector has any plain 
nobility, and is not either a coward, a bully, 
or a fool. It is a Greek who counts that 
"for every false drop" in the veins of Helen 
"a Grecian's life hath sunk"; even Hector 
doubts the wisdom of keeping Helen, though 
he would still keep up the fight, not for Helen's 
sake, but for the honour of the cause. None 
of these "heroes" have any heroical impulses; 
they fight for their own heads, for spite, 
because others are fighting. We see the 
petty inside of war, as, in Cressida and in 
Helen, we see the shallow and troubled 
depths of woman. In this morbid, almost 



152 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

Swiftian, consciousness of the dung in which 
roses are rooted. Shakespeare drags Thersites 
out of his sewer and bids us listen to him. 
Thersites is his chorus, his mouthpiece, his 
pet scavenger. 

Beside Thersites is the other sign-post to 
the knowledge of evil, Pandarus. Pandarus 
is love's broker as Thersites is the broker of 
glory. Each has a different platform from 
which to rail at the world; but Pandarus is a 
foul and feeble part of that at which Thersites 
rails. Thersites is the Falstaff of a world 
that tastes bitter. He has infinite curiosity; 
he runs recklessly into danger, in order that 
he may spy out the mean secrets on which 
his mind battens. He is beaten, and rails on, 
saying, "I serve not thee," to the stronger 
bully against whom he has only the weapon 
of his tongue. He shares with Ulysses the only 
brains in two armies of fighters, who know not 
why they are fighting, and who are drawn into 
action or out of it for straws; and he sees 
farther than Ulysses, because he does not 
see with a purpose. He is Irish in the inven- 
tive imagination of his abuse ; he has the richest 
vocabulary of any rogue in Shakespeare. His 



TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 153 

speech is a foul glory, a glory fouled. ''So 
much and such savoured salt of wit" is in his 
words that the foulness is forgotten in the 
fierce and ever-armed intelligence which, help- 
less to overthrow, pricks mortally all this 
"valiant ignorance." 

For the most part, in his plays, Shake- 
speare gives us an underplot which is a kind of 
echo or reflection of the main story; and here, 
as a luminous background for Cressida, be- 
tween Troilus and Diomedes, we see Helen, 
between Menelaus and Paris. For a moment, 
as the great lines of Marlowe come into his 
mind, Shakespeare speaks of Helen, through 
the mouth of Troilus, with reverence : 

Is she worth keeping? why, she is a pearl, 

Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships, 

And turned crowned kings to merchants! 

The wonderful scene between Paris and Helen 
(Act ni.. Scene 1) gives, with its touch of 
luxurious, almost lascivious satire, the Renais- 
sance picture of the two most famous lovers 
of the world. There is a refrain of "love, 
love, love," grossly, luxuriously, mockingly. 
"Let thy song be love," murmurs Helen: 



154 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

"this love will undo us all. Cupid, Cupid, 
Cupid!" And Paris echoes: "Aye, good 
now, love, love, nothing but love." Helen 
speaks as grossly as Cressida; Paris twice 
calls her "Nell." In the dispraise of Helen, 
from the mouth of Diomedes (Act IV., Scene 
1), Shakespeare forces the note, making even 
those who had least cause rail on the woman 
with all the contempt of hate. Yet the noblest 
praise that has ever been said of Helen comes 
to her in this pity from the undistinguished 
mouth of a punning servant, who calls her 
"the mortal Venus, the heart-blood of beauty, 
love's invisible soul." Later on, in Cleopatra, 
Shakespeare is to give us the supreme en- 
chantress, taking her wholly from her own 
point of view, or at least with sympathetic 
impartiality. Here he seems to ask with 
Pandarus, "Is love a generation of vipers?" 
His cruelty with Helen is but a part of his 
protest, his criticism, his valuation of love. 
Love in this cloying scene between Paris and 
Helen appears before us sickly, a thing of 
effeminate horror, which can be escaped only 
by turning it into laughter. 

Cressida is a symbol of Helen, the feminine 



TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 155 

animal shown us in detail. Ulysses sums her 
up in a few significant lines which say every- 
thing: 

Fie, fie upon her! 
There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, 
Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out 
At every joint and motive of her body. 
O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue. 
That give accosting welcome ere it comes, 
And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts 
To every ticklish reader! set them down 
For sluttish spoils of opportunity, 
And daughters of the game. 

She is mere sex, the Manon Lescaut of 
her period, so incapable of fidelity, so anxious 
to get her pleasure by pleasing, a coquette, 
not a criminal, petty with the instincts of the 
cat, sly and provident, apologetic to the end. 
From the first she plays at virtue, and is 
taken for chaste when she is but chary of her- 
self for a purpose. 

In Troilus we get the sensual man, brave, 
passionate, and constant, suffering from pas- 
sion as from a disease. His speech is often 
mere extravagance; but once, when he waits 
for Cressida in the orchard, he speaks perhaps 
the most sensitive lines in Shakespeare: 



156 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

I am giddy: expectation whirls me round. 

The imaginary relish is so sweet 

That it enchants my sense : what will it be 

When that the watery palate tastes indeed 

Love's thrice-repured nectar! death, I fear me, 

Swooning destruction, or some joy too fine, 

Too subtle-potent, tuned too sharp in sweetness, 

For the capacity of my ruder powers: 

I fear it much, and I do fear besides 

That I shall lose distinction in my joys, 

As doth a battle, when they charge on heaps 

The enemy fljdng. 

In those lines we get what is most precise and 
exquisite in the play, free, for the moment, 
of all irony ; a rendering of sensation sharpened 
to the vanishing-point; the sensation which 
does not know itself for pain or pleasure, so 
inexplicably is it intermingled in the delights 
of opposites. Much of what seems to us 
most characteristically modern in modern 
literature, together with almost the whole aim 
of modern music, is here anticipated. It is 
Shakespeare showing us, in a flash, that he 
may be quite fair, all of ecstasy that does really 
exist in the thing he holds up to our mockery. 
Is it with a kind of cruelty that Shake- 
speare is so patient with Cressida, setting 
her to unfold herself before us, little by 



TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 157 

little, in scene after scene nicely calculated 
for her exposure? To be so feminine and so 
vile, so much a woman, with all the woman's 
pretty tricks, and so old in craft, an angler 
for hearts; there is a dreadful and a merciless 
knowledge in the picture. In the scene in 
the court of Pandarus (Act IV., Scene 2), 
Cressida has all the lightness and unwhole- 
some charm of actual, attractive vulgarity; 
in the scene in the Grecian Camp (Act V., 
Scene 2), where we hear her words through a 
series of listeners — Troilus, Ulysses, and Ther- 
sites, the lover, the observer, and the mocker — 
she is vulgar nature naked to the roots and no 
longer deceptive. Shakespeare is using her 
to point his moral against her sex; he gloats 
over her, not to spare her. 

People have complained because Troilus 
and Cressida can be set down under no general 
title; because, as the printers of the First 
Folio discovered to their confusion, it is neither 
tragedy, comedy, nor history, but something 
of each and something else besides. It is 
made out of history, with an infinite deal of 
tragedy in the matter of it, and its upshot is 
purely comic. Here, more than anywhere 



158 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

else in Shakespeare, we get the comedy of 
pure mind, with its detachment from Hfe, 
to which it appUes an abstract criticism. 
Tragedy comes about from an abandonment 
to the emotions, and the tragic attitude is one 
of sympathy with this absorption in the mo- 
ment, this child's way of taking things seri- 
ously, of crying over every scratch. To the 
pure reason emotion is something petty, 
ridiculous, or useless, and the conflicts of 
humanity no more than the struggles of ants 
on an ant-hill. To Thersites's "critique of 
pure reason" all the heroisms of the world 
reduce themselves to his fundamental thesis: 
*'all incontinent varlets." Shakespeare uses 
not only Thersites but Pandarus to speak 
through, as he escapes the sting of love by 
making a laughing-stock of the passion under 
cover of Pandarus' s trade, and holds up war to 
contempt, through the license of the ''fool," 
mimic, and "privileged man" of these "beef- 
witted lords" who are playing at soldiers. 

To write drama from a point of view so 
aloof is to lose most of the material of drama 
and all dramatic appeal. It is to make the 
puppets cry out: See what puppets we are! 



TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 159 

When pure mind rules, manoeuvres, and judges 
the passions, we lose as well as gain. We 
lose the satisfaction of tragedy, the classic 
"pity and terror," the luxury of tears. We 
no longer see a complete thing cut boldly 
off from nature and shown to us labelled. 
We are condemned to be on the watch, to 
weigh, balance, and decide. We must appre- 
hend wholly by the intelligence, never by the 
feelings. 

We gain, certainly, in knowledge, width 
of view, hardihood. We read life, in this 
bewildering comment on it, not through the 
eyes of Shakespeare's final wisdom, but as 
Shakespeare, at one period, read life. It is 
difficult to believe that Troilus and Cressida 
does not belong to the same period as Timon 
of Athens, and that, in these two illuminating 
and bitter plays, in which the glories of the 
world are reviled in so different a temper, to 
so similar a purpose, Shakespeare is not 
giving expression to an attitude of mind 
which was his in an interval of his passage from 
serenity to serenity. His young comedies 
have, first, the trivial gaiety of mere youth 
before the spectacle of the world; then a 



160 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

woodland breath and sweetness, all the com- 
fort of nature, not tried past forbearance. 
Tragedy comes into the scheme of things simply 
as a disturbance natural to life at its height, 
the shadow pursuing love, beauty, all the 
graces of the world. The shadow darkens, 
the colours of life are washed one by one out 
of it, in a mere inexplicable spoiling of the 
delicate fabric. At the last we get the ulti- 
mate calm of The Tempest, which is the calm 
of one who has suffered shipwreck and escaped. 
Troilus and Cressida is laughter in the midst 
of the storm; it has all the wisdom that lies 
in the deepest irony. The wisdom of Shake- 
speare, as we sum it up from a contemplation 
of his whole work, is neither optimism nor 
pessimism, but includes both. It is part of 
Shakespeare's vital immensity that he can 
give us in a single play, as in Troilus and Cres- 
sida, a complete philosophy, which will prove 
sufficient for the use and fame of more than 
one great writer who is to come after him; 
and can then go on his way, creating new 
aspects from which to see life, as nature itself 
leads the way for him. 
1907. 



XI. PHILIP MASSINGER 

Philip Massinger was born at Salisbury, 
and was baptized at St. Thomas's on the 
24th November, 1583; he died at London, 
in his house on the Bankside, and was buried 
in St. Saviour's on the 18th March, 1638. 
His father, Arthur Massinger, was a retainer 
of the Herbert family, in whose service, we 
learn from the dedication of The Bondman, 
he "happily spent many years, and died a 
servant to it." The exact significance of the 
word ''servant" used many times in reference 
to Arthur Massinger's position, is not quite 
clear; it certainly represents an honorable 
form of service. Evidence of the respect in 
which the elder Massinger was held may be 
found in the letters and despatches of Henry, 
Earl of Pembroke. One of these, addressed 
to Lord Burghley, recommends him for the 
reversion of the office of Examiner in the Court 
of the Marches of Wales; another refers to 
him as negotiator in a treaty of marriage be- 

161 



162 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

tween the Pembroke and Burghley families; 
yet another describes him as the bearer of 
letters from Pembroke to the Queen. It has 
been conjectured that PhiHp Massinger may 
himself have been page to the Countess of 
Pembroke at Wilton, and imaginative his- 
torians are pleased to fancy Sir Philip Sidney 
as his possible godfather. Life at the most 
cultured and refined house in England, if such 
favour was indeed granted him, would acquaint 
the future painter of courtly manners with the 
minutest details of his subject; and in some 
of the men and women who met at Wilton he 
would see the ideal of manly chivalry, and a 
higher than the ideal of womanly virtue, to 
which his writings were to bear witness. 

The first authentic account of Massinger, 
after the register of his baptism, is the entry 
of "Philippus Massinger, Sarisburiensis, gene- 
rosi filius, nat. an. 18" (Philip Massinger, of 
Salisbury, the son of a gentleman, aged 18) 
as a commoner of St. Alban's Hall, Oxford, 
May 14th, 1602. Wood tells us that "he 
gave his mind more to poetry and romances 
for about four years or more, than to logic 
and philosophy, which he ought to have 



PHILIP MASSINGER 163 

done, as he was patronized to that end" by 
the Earl of Pembroke. Langbaine, on the 
other hand, asserts that he closely pursued his 
studies for three or four years, and that he was 
supported solely by his father. It is difficult 
for a reader of Massinger to help believing that 
logic and philosophy alternated evenly enough 
with poetry and romances. Massinger's Latin, 
by no means despicable, though it has a tend- 
ency to concentrate itself in the very service- 
able phrase Nil ultra, scarcely suggests the 
temper of a scholar; but that passionate fond- 
ness for argument, and intense devotion to 
principles in the abstract, visible in every page 
of his works, would consort very ill with the 
character of the heedless loiterer on learning 
indicated to us by Wood. In 1606 he quitted 
the University abruptly, and without taking 
a degree. About the same time occurred (it 
is believed) the death of his father; it has been 
suggested, on the one hand, that he was by this 
circumstance deprived of his support (suppos- 
ing it to have been provided by his father); 
on the other, somewhat fancifully, that "his 
father's death bereft him of the heart and hope 
of his academical studies." But if we believe 



164 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

Wood's account, his exhibition was from the 
Earl of Pembroke. The old Earl Henry, 
Arthur Massinger's patron, had died on Jan- 
uary 19, 1601. PhiHp Massinger, therefore, 
who went to Oxford more than a year after 
Earl Henry's death, would owe his support 
to William (the supposed ''Mr. W. H," of 
Shakespeare's Sonnets), eldest son and suc- 
cessor of the old earl.i Why should this 
support be suddenly and finally withdrawn? 
Earl William, we are told by Clarendon, was 
"the most universally beloved and esteemed 
of any man of that age ... of a pleasant and 
facetious humour, and a disposition generous 
and munificent . . . ready to promote the 
pretences of the worthy." Why then should 
he have ceased to promote the "pretences" 
of such a man as Philip Massinger, the son 
of one of his father's most trusted retainers? 
It is conjectured by Gifford that Massinger, 
"during his residence in the University, had 
exchanged the religion of his father for one at 
that time the object of terror, persecution, 

^ The Countess of Pembroke, though living at the time, 
had been left by her husband so badly provided for, that 
any assistance from her would be quite out of the question. 



PHILIP MASSINGER 165 

and hatred," and had, by becoming a Roman 
Catholic, aHenated the sympathies of the 
Earl of Pembroke, who is known to have pro- 
fessed a zealous and patriotic Protestantism. 
"He was a great lover of his country," says 
Clarendon, ''and of the religion and justice 
which he believed could only support it; and 
his friendships were only with men of these 
principles^' In support of his hypothesis, 
Gifford points particularly to The Virgin 
Martyr, The Renegade, and The Maid of 
Honour. I cannot think the evidence of these 
plays conclusive; but, such as it is, it certainly 
goes a long way in favour of the supposition. 
Besides the ecclesiastical legends, the curious 
conversions of The Virgin Martyr, the implied 
belief in baptismal regeneration, and the 
wonder-working Jesuit of The Renegade, Mas- 
singer's view of life and tone of moralizing 
not in these plays alone, are far removed from 
the Puritan standpoint, while distinctly and 
indeed assertively religious. The Roman 
Catholic religion would naturally have con- 
siderable attraction for a man of Massinger's 
temperament; and he would certainly have 
every opportunity of association with it in a 



166 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

University of such Catholic and conservative 
principles as Oxford. 

After leaving the University in 1606, Mas- 
singer appears to have gone to London, 
where, according to Antony Wood, ''being 
sufficiently famed for several specimens of 
wit, he betook himself to writing plays." 
The English drama was now at its height; 
Shakespeare was producing his latest and 
greatest tragic masterpieces; Jonson, Chap- 
man, Dekker, Middleton, and perhaps Mars- 
ton, were at their best; Webster was nearing 
his artistic maturity, and Tourneur flaming out 
in his sudden phase of short-lived brilliance; 
Beaumont and Fletcher were about to begin 
their career. When and how Massinger began 
to write we are not aware: probably, like 
most playrvTights of the time, he began with 
adaptation. The first mention of his name 
as a dramatist occurs in the year 1621, when 
his comedy The Woman's Plot (the play known 
to us under the name of A Very Woman) was 
performed at Court. During this period of 
fifteen years he probably produced seven plays, 
now lost to us through Mr. Warburton's 
insatiable cook;i several others in collabora- 

'": ^ The plays in Warburton's possession, burnt leaf by leaf 



PHILIP MASSINGER 167 

tion with Fletcher ;i and The Virgin Martyr, 
The Fatal Dowry, The Unnatural Combat, and 
The Duke of Milan. It may be doubted 
whether Massinger was ever sufficiently popu- 
lar to make a very good living out of his pro- 
fession of playwright. We have evidence, 
in the pitiful document discovered by Malone 
in the archives of Dulwich College, that in 
the early part of his career he was reduced to 
beg urgently for an immediate loan of £5. 
The document is undated; but it is assigned 
by Mr. Collier to 1624 or the previous year. 

After this melancholy flash of light into the 
darkness of a somewhat shadowy existence, we 
learn nothing more of Massinger's personal 
history up to the time of his death, with the 
exception of the dates of the licensing of his 
plays, a few allusions to them, and an infer- 
by his cook as covers for pie-crust, were the following: 
Minerva's Sacrifice, or, the Forced Lady (tragedy); The 
Nohh Choice, or, The Orator (comedy); The Wandering 
Lovers, or. The Painter (comedy, by Massinger and 
Fletcher); Philenzo and Hippolita (tragi-comedy, altered 
by Massinger); Antonio and Vallia (comedy, altered by 
Massinger); The Tyrant (tragedy); and Fast and Welcome 
(comedy). 

^ The plays written by Massinger and Fletcher together 
(mostly near about this period) are probably not less than 
thirteen or fourteen. 



168 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

ence or two which may be drawn from their 
dedications. It is interesting to know that 
Henrietta Maria paid Massinger the unusual 
compUment of attending the performance of 
his lost tragedy Oleander (produced May 7th, 
1634); and that another play now lost, The 
King and the Subject, having been referred 
by the Master of the Revels to the decision of 
Charles, the king gave judgment in its favour, 
contenting himself with striking out a single 
passage touching too closely on the burning 
question of Ship-Money, with the words, 
*'This is too insolent, and to be changed." 

On the morning of the 17th of March, 1638, 
Massinger, who had gone to bed on the pre- 
vious night in apparent health, was found 
dead in his house on the Bankside. He was 
buried in St. Saviour's, South wark; the entry 
of his interment reads: ^'1638. March 18th. 
Philip Massinger, stranger, in the church 
. . . 2 li." The word "stranger," pathetic 
as it now sounds, meant nothing more than 
non-parishioner; and it has been supposed that 
this fact accounts for the unusual amount of 
the charge, £2, or double that entered twelve 
years earlier in the register of the same church 



PHILIP MASSINGER 1G9 

for "John Fletcher, a poet." It is said by- 
Sir Aston Cockayne, in his "Epitaph on 
Mr. John Fletcher and Mr Philip Massinger," 
that Massinger and Fletcher, friends and com- 
rades in life, were buried in the same grave. 

When Massinger came to London, the 
English drama, as I have said, was at its 
height. But before he had begun any dramatic 
work of importance the turning-point had been 
reached, and the period of descent or degen- 
eration begun. Elizabethan had given place 
to Stuart England, and with the dynasty the 
whole spirit of the nation was changing. 
Fletcher and Massinger together represent 
this period: Fletcher by painting with dashing 
brilliance the light^ bright, showy, super- 
ficial aristocratic life of wild and graceful 
wantonness; Massinger by painting with a 
graver and a firmer brush, in darker colours 
and more considered outlines, the shadier 
side of the same impressive and unsatisfactory 
existence. The indications of lessening vital- 
ity and strength, of departing simplicity, of 
growing extravagance and affectation, which 
mark the period of transition, reappear in 
the drama of Massinger, as in that of Shirley, 



170 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

and sever it, by a wide and visible gulf, from 
the drama which we properly name Eliza- 
bethan. Massinger is the late twilight of the 
long and splendid day of which Marlowe was 
the dawn. 

The characteristics of any poet's genius 
are seen clearly in his versification. Massin- 
ger's verse is facile, vigorous, grave, in the 
main correct; but without delicacy or rarity, 
without splendour or strength of melody; 
the verse of a man who can write easily, and 
who is not always too careful to remember 
that he is writing poetry. Owing, no doubt, 
partly to the facility with which he wrote, 
Massinger often has imperfectly accentuated 
lines, such as: 

They did expect to be chain'd to the oar. 

Coleridge has remarked on the very slight 
degree in which Massinger' s verse is dis- 
tinguished from prose; and no one can read 
a page of any of his plays without being struck 
by it. It is not merely that a large proportion 
of the lines run on and overlap their neigh- 
bours; this is only the visible sign of a radical 
peculiarity. The pitch of Massinger's verse 



PHILIP MASSINGER 171 

is somewhat lower than the proper pitch of 
poetry; somewhat too near the common pitch 
of prose. Shakespeare, indeed, in his latest 
period, extended the rhythm of verse to its 
loosest and freest limits; but not merely 
did he never pass beyond the invisible and 
unmistakeable boundary, he retained the true 
intonation of poetry as completely as in his 
straitest periods of metrical restraint. 

Massinger set himself to follow in the steps 
of Shakespeare, and he succeeded in catching 
with admirable skill much of the easy flow and 
conversational facility at which he aimed. 
''His English style," says Lamb, ''is the purest 
and most free from violent metaphors and 
harsh constructions, of any of the dramatists 
who were his contemporaries. ' ' But this ' ' pure 
and free" style obtains its freedom and purity 
at a heavy cost; or let us say rather, the style 
possesses a certain degree of these two quali- 
ties because of the absence of certain others. 
Shakespeare's freest verse is the fullest of 
episodical beauties and of magical lines. But 
it is a singular thing, especially singular in a 
writer distinguished not only by fluency but by 
dignity and true eloquence, that in the whole 



172 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

of Massinger's extant works there are scarcely 
a dozen lines of intrinsic and separable beauty. 
It would be useless to look in the Massinger 
part of The Virgin Martyr for any such lines 
as these of Dekker: 

I could weary stars, 

And force the wakeful moon to lose her eyes, 

By my late watching. 

It would be equally useless to search from end 
to end of his plays. Easy flowing lines, vigor- 
ous lines, eloquent and persuasive lines, we 
could find in plenty; but nowhere a line in 
which colour melts into music, and both be- 
come magical. Not quite so difficult, but still 
very hard indeed, would it be to find any single 
lines of that rare and weighty sort which may 
be said to resemble the jar in the Arabian 
Nights into which Solomon had packed the 
genie. Had Massinger wished to represent 
Vittoria Accoramboni before her judges, he 
would have written for her a thoroughly elo- 
quent, admirable, and telling oration; but he 
could never have wrought her speech into that 
dagger with which Webster drives home the 
sharpness of her imperial scorn. That one 
line of infinite meaning: 

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young; 



PHILIP MASSINGER 173 

spoken by Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi 
over the corpse of his murdered sister, has no 
parallel in Massinger, who would probably 
have begun a long and elaborate piece of 
rhetoric with 

Stay, I feel 
A sudden alteration 

If we carry these considerations further, we 
shall see how fully the mental characteristics 
of Massinger correspond with the evidences 
of them in his versification. The ease and 
facility shown in the handling of metre are 
manifest equally in the plot and conduct of 
the plays. Massinger thoroughly understood 
the art of the playwright. No one perhaps, 
after Shakespeare, proved himself so constantly 
capable of constructing an orderly play and 
working it steadily out. His openings are as 
a rule admirable; thoroughly effective, ex- 
planatory and preparatory. How well, for 
instance, the first scene of The Duke of Milan 
prepares us, by a certain uneasiness or anxiety 
of its trembling pitch of happiness, for the 
events which are to follow! It is not always 
possible to say as much for his conclusions. 
Ingenuity, certainly, and considerable con- 



174 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

structive skill, are there, in a greater or less 
degree; and in not a few instances (as in that 
delightful play The Great Duke of Florence, or 
in that powerful play Believe as You List) 
the conclusion is altogether right and satis- 
fying. But in many instances Massinger's 
very endeavor to wind off his play in the 
neatest manner, without any tangles or frayed 
edges, spoils the proper artistic effect. His 
persistent aversion to a tragic end, even 
where a virtual tragedy demands it; his in- 
vincible determination to make things come 
to a fortunate conclusion, even if the action 
has to be huddled up or squashed together in 
consequence; in a word, his concession to the 
popular taste, no matter at what cost, not 
unfrequently distorts the conclusion of plays 
up to this point well conducted. 

Massinger's treatment of character follows 
in some respects, while it seems in others to 
contradict, his treatment of versification and 
of construction. Where Massinger most con- 
clusively fails is in a right understanding and a 
right representation of human nature; in the 
power to conceive passion and bring its speech 
and action vividly and accurately before us. 



PHILIP MASSINGER 176 

His theory of human nature is apparently 
that of the puppet-player: he is aware of 
violent but not of consistent action, of change 
but not of development. No dramatist talks 
so much of virtue and vice, but he has no con- 
ception of either except in the abstract; and 
he finds it not in the least surprising that a 
virtuous woman should suddenly cry out : 

Chastity, 
Thou only art a name, and I renounce thee! 

or that a fanatical Mohammedan should 
embrace Christianity on being told that the 
Prophet was a juggler, and taught birds to 
feed in his ear. His motto might be : 

We are all the balls of time, tossed to and fro; 

for his conception of life is that of a game of 

wild and inconsequent haphazard. It is true 

that he rewards his good people and punishes 

the bad with the most scrupulous care; but 

the good or bad person at the end of a play 

is not always the good or bad person of the 

beginning. Massinger's outlook is by no 

means vague or sceptical on religion^ or on 

1 The Renegado is a treatise on Christian evidence, The 
Virgin Martyr a chronicle of Christian martyrdom, The 
Maid of Honour concludes with a taking of the veil. 



176 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

morals; he is moralist before all things, and 
the copy-book tags neatly pinned on to the 
conclusion of each play are only a somewhat 
clumsy exhibition of a real conviction and con- 
scientiousness. But his morality is nerveless, 
and aimless in its general effect ; or it translates 
itself, oddly enough, into a co-partner of con- 
fusion, a disturbing and distracting element 
of mischief. 

Notwithstanding all we may say of Mas- 
singer's facility, it is evident that we have in 
him no mere improvisator, or contentedly hasty 
and superficial person. He was an earnest 
thinker, a thoughtful politician, a careful 
observer of the manners and men of his time, 
and, to the extent of his capacity, an eager 
student of human nature; but, for all that, 
his position is that of a foreigner travelling 
through a country of whose language he 
knows but a few words or sentences. He 
observes with keenness, he infers with acumen; 
but when he proceeds to take the last step, 
the final touch which transmutes recorded 
observation into vital fact, he finds (or we, 
at least, find) that his strength is exhausted, 
his limit reached. He observes, for instance. 



PHILIP MASSINGER 177 

that the characters and motives of men 
are in general mixed; and especially, and in a 
special degree, those of men of a certain class, 
and in certain positions. But when we look 
at the personages whom he presents before us 
as mixed characters, we perceive that they 
are not so in themselves, but are mixed in the 
making. ''We do not forbid an artist in 
fiction," says Swinburne in speaking of Charles 
Reade, 'Ho set before us strange instances of 
inconsistency and eccentricity in conduct; 
but we do require of the artist that he should 
make us feel such aberrations to be as clearly 
inevitable as they are confessedly exceptional." 
Now this is just what Massinger does not do: 
it is just here that he comes short of success 
as a dramatic artist. In Calderon's figure, we 
see his men dancing to the rhythm of a music 
which we cannot hear: nothing is visible to 
us but the grotesque contortions and fantastic 
motions of the dancer. 

Where Massinger fails is in the power of 
identifying himself with his characters, at 
least in their moments of profound passion or 
strenuous action. At his best (or let us 
say, to be scrupulous, at almost his best) he 



178 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

succeeds on the one hand in representing the 
gentler and secondary passions and emotions; 
on the other, in describing the action of the 
primary passions very accurately and admi- 
rably, but, as it were, in the third person, and 
from the outside. As Leslie Stephen says 
with reference to a fine speech of Sir Giles 
Overreach in A New Way to Pay Old Debts, 
"Read 'he' for 'I,' and 'his' for 'my,' and it 
is an admirable bit of denunciation of a char- 
acter probably intended as a copy from real 
life." His characters seldom quite speak out; 
they have almost always about them a sort 
of rhetorical self-consciousness. The language 
of pure passion is unknown to them; they can 
only strive to counterfeit its dialect. In 
handling a situation of tragic passion, in 
developing a character subject to the shocks 
of an antagonistic Fate, Massinger manifests 
a singular lack of vital force, a singular failure 
in the realizing imagination. He mistakes 
extravagance for strength, eloquence for con- 
viction, feverishness for vitality. Take, for 
instance, the jealousy of Theodosius in The 
Emperor of the East. His conduct and language 
are altogether unreasoning and unreasonable, 



PHILIP MASSINGER 179 

the extravagances of a weak and unballasted 
nature, depicted by one who can only thus 
conceive of strong passions. His sudden and 
overmastering jealousy at sight of the apple 
given by Eudocia to Paulinus is without 
probability; and Eudocia's lie when charged 
with the gift is without reason. It is almost 
too cruel in this connection to think of Desde- 
mona's handkerchief; of the admirable and 
inevitable logic of the means by which Othello's 
mind is not so much imbued with suspicion 
as convinced with certainty. ''AH this pother 
for an apple!" as some sensible person in 
the play observes. Again, in The Fatal Dowry, 
compare for a moment Malefort's careful 
bombast, which leaves us cold and incredu- 
lous before an impossible and uninteresting 
monster of wickedness, with the biting and 
flaming words of Francesco Cenci, before which 
we shudder as at the fiery breath of the pit. 
Almost all Massinger's villains, notwithstand- 
ing the fearful language which they are in the 
habit of employing, fail to convince us of their 
particular wickedness; most of his tried and 
triumphant heroes fail to convince us of their 
vitality of virtue. Massinger's conception of 



180 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

evil is surprisingly naive: he is frightened, 
completely taken in, by the big words and 
blustering looks of these bold and wicked men. 
He paints them with an inky brush, he tells 
us how very wicked they are, and he sets them 
denouncing themselves and their wickedness 
with a beautiful tenderness of conscience. 
The blackness of evil and the contrasted 
whiteness of virtue are alike lost on us, and 
the good moral with them; for we are unable 
to believe in the existence of any such beings. 
It is the same with those exhibitions of tempted 
virtue of which Massinger is so fond. I do 
not allude now to cases of actual martyrdom 
or persecution, such as those of Dorothea or 
Antiochus; but to situations of a more com- 
plex nature, such as that of Mathias with 
Honoria, or Bertoldo with Aurelia, in w^hich 
we are expected to see the soul's conflict 
between virtue enthroned and vice assailant. 
The fault is that of inadequate realization of 
the true bearing of the situation; inadequate 
representation of the conflict which is very 
properly assumed to be going on. Massinger 
is like a man who knows that the dial-hand 
of the clock will describe a certain circle, 



PHILIP MASSINGER 181 

passing from point to point to significant 
figures; but instead of winding up the clock, 
and setting it going of itself, he can only move 
round the hand on the outside. To use 
another figure, his characters oscillate rather 
than advance, their conversions are without 
saving effect on their souls, their falls have no 
damnation. They are alike outside them- 
selves, and they talk of "my lust," "my 
virtue," as of detached and portable con- 
veniences. 

When we drop to a lower level than that of 
pure tragedy, when we turn to characters who 
are grave, or mild, or melancholy, or unfor- 
tunate, rather than passionate, intense, and 
flexible, we find that Massinger is more in 
his element. "Grave and great-hearted," as 
Swinburne calls him, he could bring before us, 
with sympathetic skill, characters whose pre- 
dominant bent is towards a melancholy and 
great-hearted gravity, a calm and eloquent 
dignity, a self-sacrificing nobility of service, 
or lofty endurance of inevitable wrong. Mas- 
singer's favourite play was The Roman Actor: 
"I ever held it," he says in his dedication, 
"the most perfect birth of my Minerva." 



182 STUDIi^ IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

It is impossible to say quite that; but it is 
certainly representative of some among the 
noble qualities of its writer, while it shows very 
clearly the defects of these qualities. What 
it represents is scarcely human nature; but 
actions and single passions painted for the 
halls of kings. A certain cold loftiness, noble 
indeed, but not attained without some freez- 
ing of vital heat, informs it. Paris, the actor, 
is rather a grave and stately shadow than a 
breathing man; but the idealization is nobly 
conceived; and both actor and tyrant, Paris 
and Domitian, are, in their way, impressive 
figures, made manifest, not concealed, in 
rhetorical prolusions really appropriate to 
their time and character. Another classical 
play, the less-known Believe as You List, 
contains a figure in which I think we have the 
very best work of which Massinger was 
capable. The character of the deposed and 
exiled King Antiochus has a true heroism 
and kingliness about it; his language, a pas- 
sionate and haughty dignity. The quiet con- 
stancy, the undaunted and uncomplaining 
endurance of the utmost ills of Fate, which 
mark the character and the utterance of the 



PHILIP ^L\SSINGER 183 

Asian Emperor, raise the poetry of the play 
to a height but seldom attained by the pedes- 
trian Pegasus of !Massinger. As Antiochus 
is the most impressive of his heroes, so Flam- 
inius is one of the most really human and con- 
sistent of his \dllains. The end of the play is 
natural, po-werful, and significant beyond 
that of any other; so natural, powerful, and 
significant, that we may feel quite sure it was 
received with doubtful satisfaction by the 
audience above whose head and against whose 
taste the poet had for once chosen to write. 

In one or two striking portraits (those for 
example of the ironical old courtier Eubulus 
in The Picture, the old soldier Archidamus 
in The Bondman, or the faithful friend Romont 
in The Fatal Dowry) Massinger has shown his 
appreciation of honest worth and sober fidel- 
ity, qualities not of a showy kind, the recogni- 
tion and representation of which do him hon- 
our. In The Bashful Lover and The Maid of 
Honour he has represented with special sym- 
pathy two phases of reverential and modest 
love. Hortensio, of the former, is a sort of 
pale Quixote, a knight-errant a little crazed; 
very sincere^ and a trifle ^iven to uttering^ 



184 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA. 

vague and useless professions of hyperbolical 
humility and devotion. There is a certain 
febrile nobleness, a showy chivalry, about 
him; but we are conscious of something 
"got up" and over-conscious in the exhibi- 
tion. Adorni, the rejected lover in The Maid 
of Honour, is a truly noble and pathetic 
picture; altogether without the specious elo- 
quence and petted despair of Hortensio, but 
thoroughly human and rationally self-sacri- 
ficing. His duet with Camiola at the close of 
the third act is one of the very finest scenes 
in Massinger's works: that passage where the 
woman he loves despatches him to the rescue 
of the man on whom her own heart is set. 
"You will do this?" she says; and he answers, 
"Faithfully, madam," and then to himself 
aside, "but not live long after." A touch of 
this sort is but too rare in Massinger. 

Wliile I am speaking of The Maid of Honour, 
let me refer to the character of Camiola her- 
self: incomparably Massinger's finest portrait 
of a woman. Camiola ("that small but 
ravishing substance," as, with a rare and 
infrequent touch of delicate characterization, 
she is somewhere called) is notwithstanding a 



PHILIP MASSINGER 185 

few flaws in her delineation, a thoroughly 
delightful and admirable creature; full of 
bright strength and noble constancy, of wom- 
anly heart and most manly spirit and wit. 
Her bearing in the scene, to a part of which 
I have alluded, is admirable throughout; 
not admirable alone, but exquisite, are her 
quick "Never think more then" to the ser- 
vant; her outcry about the ''petty sum" 
of the ransom; and especially the words of 
"perfect moan" which fall from her when 
she learns the hopeless estate of her lover, 
imprisoned by his enemy, abandoned by his 
King: 

Possible! pray you, stand off. 
If I do not mutter treason to myself, 
My heart will break; and yet I will not curse him; 
He is my King. The news you have delivered 
Makes me weary of your company; we'll salute 
When we meet next. I'll bring you to the door. 
Nay, pray you, no more compliments. 

When she learns of the treachery of the 
lover for whom she has done so much, her 
wondering and sorrowful "0 Bertoldo!" is 
worth a world of rhetoric. It is she who utters 
the most famous phrase in Massinger, the 
fearless indictment of the Court doctrine of 



186 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

the divinity of kings. "With your leave/* 
she says to the King of Sicily, 

With your leave, I must not kneel, sir, 
While I reply to this : but thus rise up 
In my defence, and tell you, as a man, 
(Since, when you are unjitst, the deity, 
Which you may challenge as a king, parts from you) 
'Twas never read in holy writ, or moral. 
That subjects on their loyalty were obliged 
To love their sovereign's vices. 

Her speech in answer to Bertoldo's hollow pro- 
testations of penitence, the ''Pray you, rise," 
is full of delicate tact and subtle beauty of 
spirit. 

Unfortunately all Massinger's women are 
not of the stamp of Camiola. Lidia, indeed, 
in The Great Duke of Florence, is a good, 
sweet, modest girl; Cleora in The Bondman 
would like to be so; Bellisant in The Parlia- 
ment of Love is a brilliant, dashing creature; 
Margaret in A New Way to Pay Old Debts 
is an emphatically nice, shrewd, pleasant 
woman; and Matilda in The Bashful Lover 
a commonplace, decent young person, without 
a thread or shade of distinction. But Massin- 
ger's general conception of women, and the 
greater number of his portraits of them, are 



PHILIP MASSINGER 187 

alike debased and detestable. His bad women 
are incredible monsters of preposterous vice; 
his good women are brittle and tainted. They 
breathe the air of courts, and the air is poisoned. 
Themselves the vilest, they walk through a 
violent and unnaturally vicious world of 
depraved imagination, greedy of pleasure and 
rhetorical of desire. They are shamefacedly 
shameless; offensive and without passion; 
importunate and insatiable Potiphar's wives. 
'^ Pleasure's their heaven," affirms somebody; 
and their pleasure is without bit or bridle, 
without rule or direction. Massinger's favour- 
ite situation is that of a queen or princess 
violently and heedlessly enamoured of a man, 
appaiently of mean estate, though he generally 
turns out to be a duke in disguise, whom she 
has never seen five minutes before. Over 
and over again is this wretched farce gone 
through; always without passion, sincerity, 
or strength; always flatly, coldly, ridiculously. 
I am afraid Massinger thought his Donusas, 
Corsicas, Domitias, Aurelias, Honorias, and 
Beaumelles brilliant and fascinating flowers 
of evil, sisters of Cleopatra and Semiramis, 
magnificently wicked women. In reality they 



188 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

never attain to the level of a Delilah. They 
are vulgar-minded to the core; weak and 
without stability; mere animals if they are not 
mere puppets. The stain of sensuality or the 
smutch of vulgarity is upon even the virtuous. 
Marcelia, in The Duke of Milan, supposed to 
be a woman of spotless virtue, utters language 
full of covert licence; for Massinger seems to 
see virtue in women mainly as a sort of con- 
scious and painful restraint. Eudocia, in 
The Emperor of the East, an injured, innocent 
wife, betrays an unconscious vulgarity of 
mind which is enough to withdraw our sym- 
pathy from a fairly well-deserving object. The 
curious thing is, not so much that the same 
pen could draw Camiola and Corsica, but that 
the same pen could draw Camiola and Marcelia. 
Massinger's main field is the romantic 
drama. He attempted, indeed, tragedy, com- 
edy, and history; but both tragedy and history 
assume in his hands a romantic cast, while his 
two great comedies verge constantly upon 
tragedy. Of his two most distinct and most 
distinguished tragedies, The Duke of Milan 
and The Fatal Dowry, the former is a powerful 
and impressive work, rising in parts to his 



PHILIP MASSINGER 189 

highest level; the latter, despite its conven- 
tional reputation, which it owes partly to 
Rowe's effective plagiarization in The Fair 
Penitent, a scarcely adequate or satisfactory 
production. Two or three passages^ in the 
latter part of The Fatal Dowry have the true 
accent of nature; but even these are marred 
by the base alloy with which they are mingled. 
But The Duke of Milan, despite much that is 
inadequate and even absurd in its handling, 
rises again and again to something of passion 
and of insight. The character and the cir- 
cumstances of Sforza have been often com- 
pared with those of Othello: they are still 
more similar, I should venture to think, to 
those of Griffith Gaunt; and they have the 
damning fault of the latter, that the jealousy 
and its consequences are not made to seem 
quite inevitable. Sforza is an example, though 
perhaps the most favourable one, of that 
inconsequential oscillation of nature to which 
I have already referred as characteristic of 

^ Found chiefly in the last scene of the fourth act; from 
"If this be to me, rise," to "That to be merciful should be a 
sin," and again in the few words following on the death of 
Beaumelle; with a passage or two in the fifth act. 



190 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

most of Massinger's prominent characters. 
But his capacity for sudden and extreme 
changes of disposition, and his violent and 
unhinged passion, are represented with more 
dramatic power, with more force and natural- 
ness, than it is at all usual to find in Mas- 
singer; who has here contrived to give a fre- 
quent effect of fineness to the frenzies and 
delusions of his hero. If Sforza is after all 
but a second-rate Othello, Marcelia is certainly 
a very shrewish Desdemona, and Francisco a 
palpably poor lago.^ 

In tragi-comedy, the romantic drama pure 
and simple, we may take The Great Duke of 
Florence as the most exquisite example. In 
this, the most purely deHghtful play, I think, 
ever written by Massinger, a play which we 
read, to use Lamb's expression, "with com- 
posure and placid delight," we see the sweetest 
and most delicate side of Massinger's genius: 
a country pleasantness and freshness, a mas- 
querading and genial gravity, altogether 

^ There is one touch however, in the temptings of 
Francisco which is really almost worthy of lago: 

She's yet guilty 
Only in her intent! 



PHILIP MASSINGER 191 

charming and attractive. The plot is admi- 
rably woven; and how prettily brought about 
to a happy conclusion, with its good humour, 
forgiveness, and friendship all around! There 
is something almost of Shakespeare's charm 
in people and events; in these princes and 
courtiers without ceremony and without vice, 
uttering pretty sentiments prettily, and play- 
ing elegantly at life; in these simple lovers, 
with their dainty, easy trials and crosses on the 
way to happiness; in the villain who does no 
real harm, and whom nobody can hate. The 
Guardian, a late play, very fine and flexible 
in its rhythm, and very brisk in its action, 
has some exquisite country feeling, together 
with three or four of the most abominable 
characters and much of the vilest language 
in Massinger. One character at least, Dar- 
azzo, the male of Juliet's nurse, is really, 
though offensive enough in all conscience, 
very heartily and graphically depicted. A 
Very Woman, again, by Massinger and 
Fletcher,! has much that is pleasant and 
delightful; some of it full of sweetness, with 

^ Fletcher's slave-market scene in Act III is a piece of 
admirable merriment; singularly realistic and inventive. 



192 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

some that is rank enough. I have spoken 
already of The Maid of Honour, or it might be 
mentioned here as a play uniting (somewhat 
as in Measure for Measure, which it partly 
resembles) the lighter and graver qualities 
of tragedy and comedy under the form of the 
romantic drama. 

Massinger's lack of humour did not prevent 
him from writing comedy, nor yet from achiev- 
ing signal success in it. A New Way to Pay 
Old Debts is the most memorable of his plays; 
but, though it is styled a comedy, it is cer- 
tainly not for laughter that we turn to it. 
A New Way and The City Madam belong to 
the Comedy of Manners; satirical tran- 
script of contemporary Ufe, somewhat after the 
style of Terence or Plautus. All Massinger's 
plays are distinguished by an earnest and 
corrective tone on contemporary politics and 
current fashions; and it is no wonder that he 
succeeded in a species of play devoted wholly 
to the exhibition and satirization of the follies 
and vanities of the day. His constant touch 
on manners, even in romantic plays with classi- 
cal or eastern localities, is peculiar, and 
suggests a certain pre-occupation with the 



PHILIP MASSINGER 193 

subject, possibly due to early associations at 
Wilton House, possibly to mere personal bent 
or circumstances. Remembering the letter 
of 1624, we may be allowed to fancy a personal 
applicability in the frequent denunciations 
of usurers and delineations of the misery of 
poor debtors. But besides that, I think that 
Massinger, having no force to enter into the 
deep and secret chambers of the soul, found 
his place to be in a censorship of society, and 
was right in concerning himself with what he 
could do so well. His professedly comic 
types, even Justice Greedy, are mere ex- 
aggerations, solitary traits frozen into the 
semblance of men, without really comic effect. 
But in the conduct of these two plays, in the 
episodical illuminations of London and pro- 
vincial life, in the wealth of observation and 
satire which they exhibit, Massinger has left 
us work of permanent value; and in the char- 
acter of Sir Giles Overreach he has made his 
single contribution to the gallery of permanent 
illustrations of human nature: a portrait to 
be spoken of with Grandet and with Harpagon. 
Massinger is the product of his period, and 
he reflects faithfully the temper of court and 



194 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

society under the first Charles. Much that 
we have to regret in him was due to the mis- 
fortune of his coming just when he did, at the 
ebb of a spent wave; but the best that he had 
was all his own. Serious, a thinker, a moralist, 
gifted with an instinct for nobility and a 
sympathy in whatever is generous and self- 
sacrificing, a practical student of history, 
and an honest satirist of social abuses, he was 
at the same time an admirable story-teller, 
and a master of dramatic construction. But 
his grave and varied genius was lacking in 
the primary requirements of the dramatist: 
in imagination, in strength, in sincerity. He 
has no real mastery over the passions, and his 
eloquence does not appeal to the heart. He 
interests us strongly; but he does not convince 
us in spite of ourselves. The whole man is 
seen in the portrait by which we know him: 
in the contrast and contradiction of that 
singular face, which interests, to some degree 
attracts, yet never satisfies us, with its melan- 
choly and thoughtful grace, marred by a cer- 
tain vague weakness and a scarcely definable 
sense of something lacking. 
1887. 



XII. JOHN DAY 

John Day, "sometime Student of Caius 
College, Cambridge," a ''base fellow" and a 
"rogue" according to Ben Jonson, a good 
man and a charming writer if the evidence of 
his own plays may be credited, seems to have 
come down to posterity in the person of his 
best work, and of little beside his best. When 
he began to write for the stage is not known, — 
before 1593, some have supposed — but we 
learn from Henslowe's Diary that in the six 
years from 1598 to 1603 he had a whole 
or part share in as many as twenty-two plays, 
only one of which. The Blind Beggar of Bednal 
Green, has come down to us. These plays 
were: in 1598, The Conquest of Brute, with the 
first finding of the Bath (Day, assisted by 
Chettle); in 1599, The Tragedy of Merry 
and The Tragedy of Cox of Collumpton (with 
Haughton), The Orphan's Tragedy (with Haugh- 
ton and Chettle); in 1600, unassisted. The 
Italian Tragedy of . . . [name wanting in 
195 



196 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

the Diary], The Spanish Moor^s Tragedy and 
The Seven Wise Masters (with Dekker and 
Haughton), The Golden Ass, and Cupid and 
Psyche (with Dekker and Chettle), The Blind 
Beggar of Bednal Green (with Chettle); in 
1601, The Second Part of the Blind Beggar ^ 
and The Third Part (also with Chettle), The 
Conquest of the West Indies (with Haughton 
and Wentworth Smith), The Six Yeomen of 
the West, Friar Rush and the Proud Women of 
Antwerp, and The Second Part of Tom Dough 
(all three with Haughton) ; in 1602, unassisted, 
The Bristol Tragedy; Merry as may he, The 
Black Dog of Newgate, The Second Part of the 
Black Dog, The Unfortunate General (all with 
Hath way and Wentworth Smith), and The 
Boast of Billingsgate (with Hathway and 
others); in 1603 or earlier, Jane Shore (with 
Chettle). In 1610, we learn from the Sta- 
tioners' Register, Day wrote a play called 
The Mad Pranks of Merry Moll of the Bank- 
side; in 1619, with Dekker, The Life and Death 
of Guy of Warwick; again with Dekker, in 
or before 1623, a "French tragedy" of The 
Bellman of Paris; and in 1623, a comedy, 
Come see a Wonder. Of extant plays, The 



JOHN DAY 197 

Isle of Gulls was published in 1606; TJie Travels 
of the Three English Brothers, Sir Thomas^ 
Sir Anthony, Mr. Robert Shirley (written in 
conjunction with Rowley and Wilkins), in 
1607; Law-Tricks, or Who would have thought 
it, and Humour out of Breath, in 1608; The 
Parliament of Bees, in 1641; and The Blind 
Beggar in 1659. There is also extant in the 
British Museum (Sloane MS. 3150) an alle- 
gorical prose tract entitled Peregrinatio Scho- 
lastica, first published in Mr. Bullen's collected 
edition of Day's works in 1881; a begging 
acrostic on the name of Thomas Dowton, an 
actor; an undated letter of Day from which 
we learn of a poem on The Miracles of Christ; 
a few autograph lines belonging to some lost 
historical play: "the rest is silence." 

It is not a pleasant thought that a writer of 
such dainty and select genius as the author 
of The Parliament of Bees should have had 
to labour so hard, on such unworthy material, 
for so unthankworthy a public as that which 
left him to borrow of Henslowe two shillings, 
or it may be five shillings — ''in Redy money," 
as the record quaintly states. That the 
main part at least of these lost plays was but 



198 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

journeyman's work, work sufficient to the day 
and the evil thereof, seems evident from the 
mere titles, a small proportion no doubt of 
the whole, that have come down to us. Even 
]Mr. Bullen finds it impossible to regret the 
loss; and he would be content to spare the 
Three English Brothers and the Blind Beggar 
as well. The fact is, Day's range is exception- 
ally limited, and outside his circle he has no 
magic. 

In turning over the pages of Lamb's Speci- 
mens, it is with something of relief, after so 
much that is bloody and gloomy, that we come 
on the two or three brief extracts from The 
Parliament of Bees, by which alone, for so long 
a space of time, the name of John Day was 
known to English readers. They are so light 
and bright, so delicate in the wording and 
phrasing, so aloof and apart from the com- 
monness of everyday doings, or the sombre 
action of that little world of the Elizabethan 
drama. The choicest of Day's work comes 
with just such a sense of relief to the student 
who has traversed that country widely. It 
is a wayside rest, a noontide hour in the cool 
shadow of the woods. There is something so 



JOHN DAY 199 

pleasant about the work, that we find our- 
selves pardoning its faults and overlooking 
its shortcomings, almost without thinking 
about them. Day — it is clear if we really 
consider the matter — has but a very slight 
insight into human nature, only a very faint 
power of touching or moving us, no power 
whatever to mould a coherent figure or paint 
a full-length portrait; as to plot, he is content 
with none at all, as in the Bees, or, as in the 
other three comedies, the plot is of such 
fantastic and intricate slightness, a very 
spider' s-web of filmy threads, that it is not 
to be grasped without coming to pieces. His 
wit is a clear flame, but thin and only inter- 
mittent. Day's natural gift in that way is 
not so rich that it can stand a long draw on its 
exchequer. The good money becomes used 
up, and then, instead of putting up the 
shutters, the bank passes bad currency. All 
these are serious faults; they are leaks enough 
to sink a weightier reputation; but, somehow, 
they do no more than temper our delight in 
Day. The world of his fancy is not the 
world of our common sunlight; and life is 
lived otherwise, and men and women are some- 



200 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAIVIA 

what other than the men and women of our 
knowledge, there. It is a land into which 
the laws of logic can scarcely come; a land 
where gentle and petulant figures come and 
go like figures in a masque, aimlessly enough, 
yet to measure, always with happy effect, 
threading the forest paths as we see ourselves 
in dreams, dreams sleeping or waking, ever 
on the heels of some pleasing or exciting 
adventure. The conversation, whenever it 
is good, is carried on in jests, or in flights of 
lyrical fancy, somewhat as in Shakespeare's 
early comedies, somewhat with a sort of 
foretaste of the comedies of Congreve. If it 
is not the talk of real life, it is at least a select 
rendering of our talk at its brightest and 
freest, when black care is away, and the brain 
is quickened and the tongue loosened by some 
happy chance, among responsive friends in 
tune with a blithe mood. It is how we should 
often like to talk; and that accord with our 
likings of things, as apart from our conscious- 
ness, not always pleasant, of them, is the 
secret of a certain harmony we seem to feel 
in those parts of Day's comedies which are 
least like life. He steps quite through the 



JOHN DAY 201 

ugly surface of things, freeing us, as we take 
the step with him, of all the disabilities of 
our never quite satisfied existence. 

This land of fancy to which Day leads us, 
is essentially quite as much a land of fancy 
in the comedies which profess to chronicle the 
doings of men and women, as in the comedy 
whose dramatis personse are all bees. In The 
Isle of Gulls, Law-Tricks and Humour out 
of Breath, equally as to the spirit, very 
differently as regards the point of execution, 
Day has painted life as it pleased him to see 
it — in a delightful confusion, made up of 
entanglements, disguises, jests, sudden ad- 
ventures, good-hearted merriment, a comedy 
within a comedy. Compared with Humour 
out of Breath, the two other plays have a cer- 
tain coarseness of texture — comparative only, 
let it be understood; the action is not so pleas- 
ant, nor the wit so spontaneous. They are 
immensely lively, always entertaining, ravelled 
up with incomparable agility, full of business, 
wit and humour; breaking every now and 
then into seriousness, and, in the later play 
particularly, blossoming out quite unexpectedly 
into a tender and lyrical pathos; as in that 



202 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

scene where the forsaken countess talks with 
such sweet sadness to her maids as they sit 
at their sewing — a little passage of pure 
exquisiteness, reminding one, as now and again 
Day will remind us, of certain of the loveliest 
bits of Shakespeare. In another single scene 
in The Isle of Gulls, the tennis-court scene, 
we find a quite typical example of Day's 
special variety of wit, thin and captious 
indeed, but swift in its interchange of strokes 
as the tennis-balls, flying to and fro, with 
sharp and harmless knocks, in repartees deftly 
delivered and straight to their aim. It is in 
Humour out of Breath, however, — so suggest- 
ively named, and so truly, for the little play 
keeps us breathless at the heels of its breath- 
less actors — here, rather than anywhere else 
outside The Parliament of Bees, that the spe- 
cial note of Day's cheerful genius is heard 
most clearly. It has his finest polish, the 
cream of his wit, the pick of his women. 
Day's women are singularly charming: they 
are all of one type, and that no very subtle 
one, but they are immensely likable, and in 
this play we have the very best of them, — ■ 
Florimel, Emilia's sister, Hippolyta's and 



JOHN DAY 203 

Violetta's, but the most beautiful and brilliant 
of her sisters. Emilia, in Law-Tricks, reminds 
us, by anticipation, of Millimant; as Miso, in 
The Isle of Gulls, with her "As I am a Lady," 
seems almost like a faint foreshadowing of the 
most tragic figure on the English Comic 
stage. Lady Wishfort. But Florimel, calling 
up no associations of Congreve or any other, 
proves the most delightful of companions. 
She, like her sisters, is a creature of moods, 
bright, witty, full of high spirits, very free- 
spoken, but less free in action than in speech; 
a thoroughly English girl, perhaps the ideal 
of our favourite mettlesome breed. You can 
see her lips and eyes in a smile, flashing as 
her saucy words; and she is good-hearted, 
capable of strength in love. Here, as so often 
elsewhere. Day's instinctive sympathy with 
whatever is honest, lovely and of good report, 
shows itself in unthought-of touches. He 
cannot conceive a villain; his fantastic figures 
and the fantasy of his action have alike a basis 
of honesty and rectitude, never intrusive, 
scarcely visible perhaps, often, but there if 
we choose to look for it. Just this quality, 
going out into very homely material, gives to 



204 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

the hasty, irregular, rough and romping play 
of The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green a saving 
grace, and not of morals, but of art; for it is a 
touch of nature. Touches of nature there 
are, but of another kind, in Humour out of 
Breath; always, however sincere, however 
serious, with an after-thought or atmosphere 
of brightness in or about them : as in Aspero's 
wooing of Florimel, passing out of jests and 
quibbles into hearty earnest, earnest from the 
first perhaps on both sides, though the lady 
has a dancing wit, and the gentleman goads 
a sober tongue to curvets. How pretty a 
touch of nature is this: "I cannot live without 
him!" cries Florimel, when her saucy petu- 
lance has driven away her lover. "0 that he 
knew it, lady," suggests the quick-witted 
little page, at fault for once in a lover's moods; 
for, "He does," returns Florimel, never at 
fault; "he would never have left me else. He 
does!" Touches of this sort, true to nature 
in the more intimate and subtle sense, are not 
common in Day; he is not wont to reveal any- 
thing new to us in our own hearts, or to go 
often below the surface. It would be unfair 
to lay this to his charge, for he does not profess 



JOHN DAY 205 

to give us more than we find in him. "Hu- 
mour out of breath," a world where wit i3 
the all in all — this is what he gives us; a world, 
how delightful to contemplate, where men and 
women are so careful of their jests, and the 
measure and harmony of this absorbing play- 
business, that they will even (as Polymeter 
says on some occasion, in another play) "leave 
at a jest," and turn the conversation after a 
period of punning. 

I have said that the scene of these three 
comedies is virtually a land of fancy; in 
The Parliament of Bees it is not only virtually 
but formally so. No instinct could have 
been happier than that which led Day — could 
it have been with any thought of Aristophanes? 
— to turn the "men and women fashioned by 
his fancy" into bees, and give them a whole 
play to themselves. That this was an after- 
thought, only come upon after a large part of 
what now forms the play was written, seems 
evident; for, as Mr. BuUen has pointed out, 
"with the exception of characters 1, 11, and 
12, which were plainly written for the occa- 
sion, the masque seems to have been made up 
of scenes, more or less revised, contributed 



206 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

to [Dekker's] Wonder of a Kingdom, [Samuel 
Rowley's] Spanish Soldier, and other plays 
that have either been lost or where the con- 
nection remains yet to be pointed out." There 
is not even an attempt at anything like a plot; 
what we have is a sequence of scenes, sketch- 
ing, and lightly satirising, the "humours" 
of the age under this queer disguise of the bees. 
It is doubtful whether Day ever intended it, 
but in this fantastic masque of his there are all 
the elements of an heroically comic picture 
of life; life seen from the point of view of an 
outside observer, in all its eager stir and 
passion, so petty and so vain if one could look 
down on it from above — in all its strenuous 
littlenesses, its frail strength, its gigantic 
self-delusions; petty, all of it, to the Gods, 
as these tiny creatures, with their insect life 
of a summer, seem to men. Here is the quack, 
the braggart, the spendthrift, each with all 
the passions of a man — and just as long as your 
nail! But if this view enters at all into 
Day's scheme, it is suffered to add no bitter- 
ness, no touch of spleen, to this sweet and 
gracious little play, revised, as we know from 
an earlier manuscript still existing, with such 



JOHN DAY 207 

a tender care, not only for the clear polish of 
the lines, but equally for the pleasant whole- 
someness of the story, the honesty and fair 
fame of the little personages. Quite the best 
scene, the sixth, between Arethusa and Ulania 
concerning Meletus, has gained the most from 
this revision: it is free now from any speck, 
and is one of the loveliest pastorals in our 
language, a liAtle masterpiece of dainty in- 
vention, honey-hearted and without a sting; 
touching at one point, in the last speech of 
the poor neglected bee, the last limits of Day's 
capacity for pensive and tender pathos. Noth- 
ing in the play is so bee- like, nothing so human, 
as this all-golden episode; though in pastoral 
loveliness it is touched, I think, by the wood- 
notes of the final octosyllabics — verses of 
exquisite inappropriateness for bees, but with 
all the smell and freshness of the country in 
them, a pageant of the delightful things of 
nature and husbandry, written in rhymes that 
gambol in pairs like lambs or kids in spring. 

Without The Parliament of Bees we should 
never have known what Day was capable of. 
The wit and invention of his comedies of 
adventure make up, it is true, a very distant 



208 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

and a very important part of his claim on the 
attention of posterity; but these comedies, 
after all, are very largely written, especially 
in the best parts of them, in prose, and it 
is as a poetical craftsman that Day is most 
himself and most perfect. Such a line as 
this: 

Who then shall reap the golden crop you sow? 

bears the very sign and seal of Day. Or, 
again : 

The windows of my hive, with blossoms dight, 
Are porters to let in our comfort, light. 

Our comfort, light — the very cadence of these 
beautiful words rings of Day, and the meaning 
equally with the sound. His peculiar vein 
of fancy comes out typically in those lines 
where the Plush Bee longs, like Alexander, 
for "ten worlds" — indeed to sell, but to sell 
''for Alpine hills of silver, '^ so prettily extrava- 
gant, so new and unthought-of a phrase. 
Familiar and quite ordinary ideas, common- 
place thoughts, take in his mmd an aspect 
which gives them all the charm of a pleasing 
novelty — a fanciful aspect, very fresh and 



JOHN DAY 209 

pleasant, the good cheer of fancy. There is 
often an airy spring in his moods, lifting his 
honest commonplaces quite off the ground; 
transforming them, as frost transforms and 
transfigures the bare branches of the trees. 
The very sound of his rhymes is a delight in 
itself, as in those lines which tell how 

of the sudden, listening, you shall hear 
A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring 
ActsBon to Diana in the spring. 

Instinctive harmony — a sense of delicate music 
in the fall and arrangement of quite common 
words, entirely without factitious aid, as of 
undue alliteration, or the smallest sacrifice 
of matter to metre — this is his gift; and it is 
without any appearance of effort that verse 
flows after beautiful verse, so easy does it 
seem for him to "add to golden numbers 
golden numbers." Easy or not, we know it 
was not without labour that this play of his 
became what it is. Day was no trifler, slight, 
airy, fantastically delicate as his work may 
be; it was not a trifler, a workman careless 
of the things of art ,who wrote these lines: 

The true Poet indeed doth scorn to gild 
A coward's tomb with glories, or to build 



210 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

A sumptuous pyramid of golden verse 
Over the ruins of an ignoble hearse. 
His lines like his inventions are born free, 
And both live blameless to eternity: 
He holds his reputation so dear 
As neither flattering hope nor servile fear 
Can bribe his pen to temporize with kings: 
The blacker are their crimes, he louder sings. 

The writer of these splendid lines was no 
"base fellow" such as Ben Jonson's hasty 
spleen would have dubbed him, but a poet 
with an instinctive sense of melody which 
Jonson never possessed, and an ideal of art 
as lofty as Jonson's own. His work has no 
conquering force, no massive energy, no super- 
abundance of life; these qualities we can get 
elsewhere, but nowhere save in Day that 
special charm of fancy and wit and bright 
invention, "golden murmurs from a golden 
hive," for which, if there is any saving grace 
in these things, we can suppose his name 
will live a little longer yet. 

1888. 



XIII. MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 

Thomas Middleton is thought to have 
been born in London about 1570; he died 
there, and was buried at Newington Butts 
on 4 July, 1627. All that we know about 
him is that he married a daughter of one of the 
six clerks in chancery, and had a son in 1604; 
that he was city chronologer from 1620 till 
the time of his death, when he was succeeded 
by Ben Jonson; that, in 1624, he was sum- 
moned before the privy council, with the actors 
who had played in his Game of Chess, and, it 
appears, put in prison at the instigation of 
Godomar, the Spanish ambassador; and that, 
in 1619, Ben Jonson spoke of him to Drum- 
mond of Hawthornden as " a base fellow." 
This hard saying may, after all, have been 
meant as no more than a literary criticism. 
The words are : ''that Markham (who added his 
English Arcadia) was not of the number 
of the Faithful, i.e., Poets, and but a base 
fellow. That such were Day and Middleton.' 

211 



212 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

This might mean no more than that, to 
Johnson, Middleton's art or verse seemed 
*'base," in the sense of pedestrian, or going on 
a low level. Nothing more was said about 
him by anyone of consequence, except a 
passing word from Scott, until the time of 
Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poetry 
in 1808. Lamb gave copious and carefully- 
chosen extracts from his plays, and said 
almost all the essential things about him; 
Leigh Hunt followed, picking up the one grain 
left over by Lamb; and, in 1860, Dyce brought 
out a complete edition of the plays, which was 
re-edited and extended by BuUen in 1885. Of 
William Rowley, there has never been any 
edition, and we know even less of him than of 
Middleton. He is conjectured to have been 
born about 1585 and to have died some time 
after 1637, the year of his marriage. He was 
an actor in various companies, and is sup- 
posed to have revised plays for new perform- 
ances. For the most part, he collaborated 
with other playwrights, especially with Mid- 
dleton; and the finest work of both Middleton 
and Rowley is done in this collaboration. 
His chief play, AlVs Lost by Lust, has never been 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 213 

reprinted from the scarce original edition of 
1633. Besides the plays, he published, in 
1609, A Search jhr Money; or, the Lamentable 
Complaint for the Loss of the Wandering Knight, 
Monsieur U Argent, a pamphlet in the manner 
of the time, full of crude realistic satire, 
written in his abrupt, lean and downright 
prose. 

The earliest work attributed to Middleton 
is an endless composition in six-line stanzas 
called The Wisdoin of Solomon Paraphrased, 
published in 1597. The dedication to Lord 
Devereaux, and an address, wanting in some 
copies, "to the Gentlemen-Readers," are both 
signed Thomas Middleton, and we can but 
hope that it was someone else of the same name. 
Addressing the critics, as Momus and Zoilus, 
the writer regrets, not quite truthfully, "I 
lack a scarecrow," and bids them " if you gape 
for stuffing, hie you to dead carrion carcases, 
and make them your ordinaries." But no better 
fare is provided, and a sufficient scarecrow has 
been set up over this unploughed field by every 
subsequent editor. The task, if he really 
endured it, must have effectually cured Mid- 
dleton of any further inclination for preaching. 



214 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

"0 weak capacity of strongest wit!" he la- 
ments, and with justice; yet, two years after- 
wards, seems to have attempted satire with no 
less futility than sermonising. Micro-cynicon. 
Sixe Snarling Satyres, published in 1599, has 
been attributed to Middleton for no more cer- 
tain reason than the signature ''T. M. Gent" 
which follows the introductory Defiance to 
Envy with which the writer, in imitation of 
Hall, introduces his first and only book of 
satires. They are weakly imitated from Mar- 
ston. 

My pen's two nebs shall turn into a fork, 
Chasing old Envy from so young a work, 

the writer threatens; but the threat could not 
possibly have been needed. The ''snarling 
Muse now thundering rh^/^me" so feebly must 
have been beyond the reach of envy, and is 
now too insignificant to need identification. 
But Middleton was an unequal writer, and it 
is impossible to discredit even such bad work 
as being unlikely because unworthy to have 
been written by him. 

His mark is much more distinctly to be 
traced in two pamphlets published in 1604, 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 213 

and signed T. M. in their epistles to the reader. 
The less interesting of them is Father Huhhurd's 
Tales, which contains a good deal of indiffer- 
ent verse, no better than Middleton's lyric 
verse usually is. Its main interest for us is 
in the very kindly and regretful praise of 
Nashe, whom he calls ''honest soul," "too 
slothful to thyself," "cut off in thy best bloom- 
ing May": 

Drones eat thy honey : thou wast the true bee. 

The tract is one of the allegorising satires of 
the time, written in a slow narrative style, 
with abundant detail of the manners and 
fashions censured, and a good deal of quite 
sober realism in the descriptions and incidents. 
The Black Book is more extravagant and more 
pungent, and is like a sample of the raw 
material, presented to us by the playwright 
in his first self-conscious pose as moralist. 
He parades as one "diving into the deep of 
this cunning age" and bringing to light "the 
infectious bulks of craft, cozenage, and pan- 
derism, the three bloodhounds of a common- 
wealth." And he professes that his lively 
exposures are meant for the warninsj and 



216 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

confirming of the ''truly virtuous," and com- 
mends himself for "the modesty of my phrases, 
that even blush when they discover vices and 
unmask the world's shadowed villanies." The 
tale is put into the mouth of Lucifer, who 
speaks his own prologue in a vigorous piece 
of blank verse and rime, by way of response 
to Nashe's dedication of Pierce Pennilesse to 
"the high and mightie Prince of darknesse, 
Donsell dell Lucifer, King of Acheron, Stix 
and Phlegeton, Duke of Tartary, Marquesse 
of Cocytus, and Lord high Regent of Lymbo." 
The pamphlet is done in Nashe's manner, 
and shows no less knowledge of its subject. 
It describes what may well have been Nashe's 
death-bed, seen by "the sullen blaze of a melan- 
choly lamp that burnt very tragically upon the 
narrow desk of a half-bedstead, which descried 
all the pitiful ruins throughout the whole 
chamber." It shows glimpses of "your twelve 
tribes of villany," at much the same machina- 
tions as in the plays; and the devil, having 
gone to and fro in London, "to gorge every 
vice full of poison," sits down to make out his 
last will and testament, leaving legacies "like 
ratsbane, to poison the realm," in a catalogue 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 217 

of the more profitable of the vices. We see 
Middleton, for all his drawing of a moral, very 
interestedly at home in the details of all that 
he denounces; preparing himself, deliberately 
or not, for his work as a writer of dramatic 
comedy. 

It is quite possible that The Mayor of Queen- 
horough, which was printed with IMiddleton's 
name in 1661, is the earliest play of his that 
we have; and quite possible that we have it 
only in a revised state. Such merit as there 
is in the play lies almost wholly in individual 
lines and passages, which stand out from a 
confused and rather hideous mingle of tragic 
bombast and strained farce. The dumb-show 
and choruses between the acts are not less 
immature than the horrors in action by which 
we can imagine Middleton to be trying to 
force himself to be tragic. I can see no trace 
of Rowley anywhere in the play, least of all in 
the comic scenes, which have distinct traces 
of the manner of Middleton. The whole 
play seems to me the premature attempt of a 
man, not naturally equipped for tragic or 
romantic writing, to do the tragic comedy 
then in fashion ; and his attempt was probably 



218 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

continued in the plays, now lost, at which 
we know Middleton was working in 1602: 
Caesar^s Fall, with Munday, Drayton, and 
Webster; The Two Harpies, with the same and 
Dekker; and The Chester Tragedy. In Blurt, 
Master Constable, which belongs to the same 
year and is the first of his published plays, we 
see him recovering himself after this false 
start, and setting off spiritedly on the comedies 
of intrigue which were to form the first division 
of his work. The prose has become alive, 
and swift of foot; the dialogue slips easily 
from prose into verse and back again; the 
action, and these unchastened tongues, gallop. 
Middleton has found a subject-matter and a 
technique; and to these he will be almost 
wholly faithful for the long first half of his 
career, the fifteen years of comedy. 

That is, unless we are to believe, on the 
strength of a dubious allusion, that Middleton, 
before writing The Mayor of Queenhorough, 
wrote The Old Land, or part of it, and that 
Massinger and Rowley, who would both have 
been too young to have collaborated with 
him at the time, added large portions later. 
Of Massinger, there is no trace in the play, 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 219 

but of Rowley the traces are unmistakable, 
not so much in the actual writing of the comic 
parts as in the whole conception of the main 
scenes and characters. The play is in a sense 
the preparation for A Fair Quarrel of 1617, 
in which both wTote together, and it seems to 
mark the beginning of the collaboration, and 
of that new influence which came into Middle- 
ton's work w^ith Rowley. It is in these two 
plays that we find, for the first time, that 
" exquisiteness of moral sensibility" which 
Lamb divined in one and that ''delicacy of per- 
ception in matters of right and wrong" which 
he distinguished in the other. 

From 1602, the date of Blurt, Master Con- 
stable, to 1617, the date of A Fair Quarrel, 
almost the whole of Middleton's work is in 
farcical comedy, at once realistic and satirical. 
It is to the early part of this period that a play 
is generally attributed whose authorship no 
one would have troubled to enquire into if 
it had not been published as " written by 
W. S." The Puritan is still printed among 
what are called the "doubtful plays " of Shake- 
speare. When Swinburne says that it is 
"much more like Rowley's than like Middle- 



220 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

ton's worst work" he is, I think, strictly true, 
but is not to be taken to mean that Rowley 
wrote it. There is nothing sufficiently in- 
dividual in the play to give so much as a solid 
starting-point for conjecture. Compare it 
with the worst of Middleton's comedies, The 
Family of Love, and in that tedious satire 
there is at least some intention, though that 
intention is now mainly lost to us; it is the 
realist's attempt to show up the dulness of dull 
people by making them speak and act no more 
nimbly than was natural to them. The parody 
there is, apparently, so close that we can 
mistake it for the original. But the diction, 
though creeping, is not ignoble; it is like the 
fumbling of a man on an instrument which 
he is on the way to master. The fumbler 
of The Puritan will get no further. 

In 1604 Middleton had some share in The 
Honest Whore of Dekker, but no very consider- 
able one, so far as his manner can be traced 
there, and, seven years later, we find him 
collaborating again with Dekker in The Roaring 
Girl, though here, also, what is finest in the 
play seems to be Dekker's. Apart from these 
two divergences, and an occasional masque 



I 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 221 

or pageant, done to order, his course is direct, 
and his main concern, as he defines it later, 
in commending The World tost at Tennis to the 
reader and understander, is to be ''neither too 
bitterly taxing, nor too soothingly telling, the 
world's broad abuses." In a prefatory address 
to the "comic play-readers" of The Roaring 
Girl, he is still more explicit. "The fashion," 
he says, 

of play-making I can properly compare to nothing so nat- 
urally as the alteration in apparel; for in the time of the 
great crop-doublet, your huge bombasted plays, quilted 
with mighty words to lean purpose, was only then in 
fashion: and as the doublet fell, neater inventions began 
to set up. Now, in the time of spruceness, our plays follow 
the niceness of our garments ; single plots, quaint conceits, 
lecherous jests, drest up in hanging sleeves: and those 
are fit for the times and the termers. Such a kind of light- 
colour summer stufif, mingled with divers colours, you 
shall find this published comedy. 

The early comedy of Middleton is as light, 
rancid, and entertaining as anything in the 
Elizabethan drama. It is irresponsible rather 
than immoral, and does not exactly recom- 
mend or approve of the trickeries and de- 
baucheries which it represents in a life-like 
way, under such hnprobable conditions. Yet 



222 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

the writer is no more careful of his ethical than 
of his other probabilities, and takes little 
trouble to keep up any consistency in the 
minds or morals of his agile puppets. His 
aim is at effect, and he rarely fails in his aim. 
Even when we do not believe in the persons, 
and do not care about the upshot of the action, 
we are almost constantly enlivened, and, 
willingly, or unwillingly, carried along. Mid- 
dleton allows us to hate or despise, but not to 
disregard him. 

The main material of his comedy is in the 
acts and moods of the human animal. Sex 
dominates the whole Elizabethan drama, but 
here it is not a terror, a fascination, or a sin, 
but an occupation. A passage in The Phoenix 
might be applied to almost any of these plays: 

What monstrous days are these! 
Not only to be vicious most men study, 
But in it to be ugly; strive to exceed 
Each other in the most deformed deed. 

Is it a merit in Middleton that he shows us 
vice always as an ugly thing, even when he 
seems to take pleasure in it, and to forget to 
condemn it? The ''beggarly fools and swarm- 
ing knaves," to use a phrase of his own, who 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 223 

iraffick in souls, bodies, and possessions 
throughout these travesties, confusions and 
''famiUar accidents which happen in town," 
are set a-gog by no morahst, but by so keen 
and unprejudiced an observer of the human 
comedy that, for the most part, they come 
out in their naked colours, almost against 
his intention. And, as he lets vice peep 
through all cloaks and stand self-condemned, 
so he shows us a certain hardly-conscious 
*' soul of goodness in things evil." There is true 
and good human feeling in some of the most 
shameless scenes of Your Five Gallants, where 
a whole lost and despised world of ''strange 
devils and pretty damnable affections" is 
stirred up into plausible action. They take 
place where there is "violet air, curious garden, 
quaint walks, fantastical arbours, three back- 
doors, and a coach-gate," in a " music-school " 
or " Maison Tellier " of the period, and the very 
names of the characters are hardly quotable. 
The humanity is accidental, and comes from 
absolute knowledge of a world where "every 
part shoots up daily into new subtlety; the 
very spider weaves her cauls with more art 
and cunning to entrap the fly." Middleton, 



224 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

though the spider preoccupies him, and lends 
him a web for spinning, puts the fly too into 
the pattern. 

If we seek a reason for the almost universal 
choice of brothels and taverns as the scenes 
of Elizabethan comedy, we shall find it 
partly in a theory, accepted from the Latin 
and Italian drama, that this was the proper 
province of the comic muse. The accidents 
of a player's or professional writer's life gave 
opportunities for knowledge of just that world 
into which he was naturally thrust. The 
Elizabethan audience was accustomed from the 
first to the two extremes of novel tragedy and 
brutal comedy. That violent contrast ap- 
pealed to a taste always hungering and thirst- 
ing for strong meat and strong drink. The 
puritan limits had not yet fixed themselves; 
they were but divined as a thing one could be 
aware of and mock at. At the same time, the 
stage was not exactly respected; it had no 
character to keep up. Thus, the dramatist, 
being as free as the modern French caricaturist 
to make his appeal in the most direct way, 
to the animal through the animal, had no 
hesitation in using the gross material at hand 



'»!«■ 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 225 

grossly. In the more serious men, we get no 
more than painful attempts to please a taste 
which Middlcton must have found it easy 
to gratify. He was no dreamer, he was not a 
poet in the instinctive irrepressible sense in 
which Dekker, for instance, was a poet, and 
he shared a love which was common to Dekker 
and to others at that time, for mean adventures 
of loose people in cities, knaves who gulled 
and fools who were gulled, sharpers, highway- 
men, and, outside cities, gipsies. His eyes 
were open upon every folly of fashion or freak 
of religion; he knew his law and his lawyers, 
and he saw their capacities for entertainment; 
he had all the terms of cant and astrology at 
his finger's ends, and realised the savour of 
the oddities of popular speech. It was easy 
to him to set these people talking as they would 
really talk, or with just that heightening which 
his sense of pungent and appropriate words 
gave him; and he could set scene after scene 
galloping across the stage, not taking more 
trouble than his public demanded in making 
his plots consistent or probable, so long as 
they went at full speed along familiar ways; 
not caring, most of the time, to create individ- 



226 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

ual characters, but relying upon the effect 
of vividly realised moods, of people very much 
alive for a given moment. A character so 
ripely developed as Sir Bounteous Progress in 
A Mad World, my Masters is rare among these 
nimble types and instances of fixed follies 
or ascertained "humours." 

What we remember Middleton's comedies 
for is not their separate characters but their 
brace of gallants, their "school" of wantons, 
their clash of cozener with cozener, their 
ingenuities of deceit, the "heat of fury" of their 
entangled action. We remember single scenes, 
of a marvellous and sometimes cruelly comic 
reality, like the death-bed of Dampit the 
drunkard in A Trick to catch the Old One, 
or that other death-scene in A Chaste Maid in 
Cheapside, where an old sinner makes his last 
end in grotesque and frightened repentance, 
while the man and woman whom he may be 
supposed to have most wronged remember 
the fact for the first time as they foresee the 
cutting short of their shameful revenue. Here, 
as often in Middleton, irony comes out of the 
mere faithfulness with which he sets before us 
exactly what would happen at such a moment 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 227 

as that. His plays are full of these paradoxes 
of event, which it is the custom to call unpleas- 
ant, and which, sometimes, certainly are 
unpleasant when the playwright seems to be 
unaware that some hideous piece of villany 
is being set to rights (so far as relative justice 
is concerned) by a trick of virtue not less 
unpardonable. 

If Bullen is right in his conjecture that The 
Widow (a play published in 1652 as a "lively 
piece, drawn by the art of Jonson, Fletcher, 
and Middleton") belongs to about this date, 
revised later, it would, for Middleton, be 
curiously innocent in the midst of all its vivid 
banter and thieves' foolery. In how many 
plays of this period could the characters say 
to one another at the close, without irony, 
"Be good" and "Be honest," as two of the char- 
acters do here? Jonson is for nothing in it, 
unless as a passing influence; but I do not see 
why Fletcher might not have been the reviser, 
as well as the writer of one or two of the songs. 
But the main part, unmistakably, is Middle- 
ton's, and it is, perhaps, in this play that the 
romantic element first shows itself among the 
incidents and actualities of knavery. 



228 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

It took Middleton a long time to realise 
that there was such a thing as honour, even in 
transactions which he felt it his business to 
watch from the knaves' point of view, because 
that was the one which would best entertain 
his audience. He chose stories, persons and 
surroundings for their immediate stage effect, 
making them as real and amusing as he could, 
scene by scene; and it was so rarely that it 
occurred to him to temper the trickeries of 
his plots by some honest motive that we find 
him confusing moral values without due indi- 
cation of being aware of it. There is no 
doubt that he wrote hastily, and with ease, 
and a man who writes hastily and with ease 
for the stage will readily sacrifice a point of 
conscience to a theatrical solution. Once, 
in The Roaring Girl, some frank and convincing 
honesty comes into the bad company, and has 
the best of it there. But how much of Middle- 
ton is to be found in what gives a pleasant 
quality to that one play, not less astir than the 
others with his usual crew and company? 

Though the work of each overlaps occasion- 
ally, there can be little doubt of the main shares 
of Middleton and Dekker in The Roaring Girl. 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 229 

It is, undoubtedly, Dekker who has created, 
and mainly set in action, the good honest 
hoyden who masquerades through the play 
in the name of Moll Cutpurse, a creature of 
another colour, if we can believe contemporary 
records. "Worse things I must needs confess," 
says Middleton in his preface "to the comic 
play-readers," "the world has taxed her for 
than has been written of her; but 'tis the 
excellency of a writer to leave things better 
than they are." To paint a woman who 
asks justly, 

must you have 
A black ill name because ill things you know? 

and to show her talking thieves' slang among 
thieves with an easy familiarity, and yet going 
through this evil company like a knight- 
errant, helping honest lovers and pulling 
down knaves, was a task more within the 
power of Dekker than of Middleton, whose 
metre and manner come and go with the galli- 
pots and rattling roguish shop-keepers who cry 
their wares and complicate their private doings 
through the whole underplot of the play. 
But little of the really significant speech of 



230 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

Moll can be attributed to Middleton, and, 
though much of the business and movement of 
the play is his, and much of the ''manners," 
Dekker, too, is responsible for the fifth act with 
its almost too liberal local colour of "canting." 
The play is untidy, but very much alive; 
and Dekker seems to bring fresh air into musty 
rooms, not only by the presence of this vital 
woman, not to be paralleled elsewhere in 
Middleton's comedies, but by a way of writing 
which is more a poet's way than his. The very 
sound of the lines has a lilt and spring in them, 
as in a casual image of this kind : 

my thoughts must run, 
As a horse runs that's blind, round in a mill, 
Out every step, yet keeping one path stiU. 

Middleton's verse, for all its sinews, could not 
have given just that turn to a line; and Dekker 
brings with him that beauty which was 
always a natural accident in his speech. 

The prose of Middleton, as we see it in the 
comedies, used more often than verse, but 
dropping easily into and out of verse, is a pun- 
gent, fluent, very natural and speakable prose. 
It has lightness, and yet is not empty, is often 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 231 

witty without going unduly beyond the prob- 
abilities of talk; only at times, as in The 
Family of Love, does it become pedantic ; and 
it rarely loses a certain deftness even when 
it drops into beastliness. Touches of the 
edged speech of the period, which shines and 
strikes, are not wanting. "Bright Helena of 
this house, would thy Troy were a-fire, for I 
am a-cold," says someone, on no particular 
occasion. The prose goes at a great rate, and 
carries you with it, while you travel slowly 
with Rowley, as often as he takes Middleton's 
place. And the verse is hardly less swift, 
galloping often on more feet than the measure 
demands, but rarely jarring the measure. In 
some of the plays, Middleton takes no care to 
modulate from prose into verse, but jumps 
forward and backward with little need, barely 
lifting the verse above the measure of the prose. 
Gradually the quality and adaptability of the 
verse improve; developing directly out of the 
prose it becomes not less flexible. And we 
find him cultivating with increasing skill what 
had always been a homely colloquial tendency, 
dealing in culinary and haberdashery similes, 
more at home with a dish or dress than with 



232 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

the moon, and able to set dumb things into 
gesture, thus: 

Troth, you speak wondrous well for your old house here; 
'Twill shortly fall down at your feet to thank you, 
Or stoop, when you go to bed, like a good child, 
To ask your blessing. 

Verse, to Middleton, is a native idiom; he 
speaks in it naturally, bending it as he pleases, 
to any shade of meaning, filling it with stuff 
alien to poetry and yet keeping its good metre. 
He does not write for the sake of the verse, 
and only a native honesty of ear keeps him 
from dropping clean out of it, without knowing, 
into prose. Thus, he has few fine passages; 
yet a few of them he has, where imagination 
has fastened upon him, and dictated his 
words. His lines run often, in his later work, 
to fourteen syllables, yet their feet slide easily 
within the measure. As he lets his lines grow 
longer, so he allows himself longer speeches, 
because he knows that he can keep the ear 
awake and following them. And, by the 
time of The Changeling the versification has 
become graver, with a new thrill in it, through 
which passion, and not only the mind's 
energies, can now speak. Was it Rowley who 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 233 

first showed Middleton the possibility of that 
passionate note, by which drama becomes not 
only drama but poetry? 

If, as I have conjectured, The Old Law leads 
the way from the farcical comedies to the tragic 
comedies like A Fair Quarrel, it is in that play 
that the influence of Rowley may be first dis- 
tinguished; and it is impossible not to connect 
it with the change which came about in the 
work of Middleton, a change from work 
almost wholly comic, and of the city kind, 
to a work partly tragic and partly comic in a 
higher and more romantic sense. We find 
Rowley's name beside Middleton's on the title- 
pages of The Old Law, A Fair Quarrel, The 
World tost at Tennis, The Spanish Gipsy, 
and The Changeling; most, that is, of the finest 
of Middleton's later work, with only the two 
exceptions of Women beware Women and A 
Game at Chess. The manner and measure 
of this collaboration is not so easy to discover 
as it may at first sight appear. It is his faults 
that are most obvious in Rowley, his dissonant 
verse, his over-strained speech, his incapacity 
for construction, something jagged and uneven 
in his whole work; and it is only gradually 



234 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

that people are beginning to realise that these 
defects are not the essential part of him. 
His plays have had the not unnatural mis- 
fortune to be chaotically printed, verse and 
prose never clearly distinguished from one 
another; and some of them are only to be found 
in a few rare copies of the original editions. 
It is difficult to be certain of his exact share 
in many plays to which his name is, rightly 
or wrongly, appended. One thing is certain; 
that the plays written by Rowley and Middle- 
ton together are finer than any of the plays 
written by either separately. And it is almost 
equally certain that Rowley's share in the work 
was not confined to those scenes or passages in 
which his actual hand can be distinguished 
in the versification, but that there was a fur- 
ther and closer collaboration of a kind which no 
tests of style or versification can ever dis- 
entangle. We have seen Middleton working 
alone, and, to a slight extent, with Dekker; 
we shall see him, at the end of his career, 
again working alone. We have now to con- 
sider what can be found out about Rowley, in 
such work as he did by himself or in company 
with others, before we can hope to arrive at 



^ 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 233 

any conclusion in regard to the work in which 
he is the companion of Middleton. 

The plays published under Rowley's name 
or initials are : A New Wonder, a Woman never 
Vexed, 1632; AlVs Lost by Lust, 1633; A 
Match at Midnight, 1633; and A Shoemaker a 
Gentleman, 1638. Of these A Match at Mid- 
night has little resemblance with any of his 
known work, while it has a close resemblance 
with the early work of Middleton. It goes 
with something of the rapidity of the wild 
and whirling comedies of about the time of 
Your Five Gallants, but would add more credit 
to an imitator than to Middleton. Here, as 
elsewhere, Rowley may in his capacity of actor 
have made slight changes for acting purposes, 
which would account for the use of his initials. 
There is no reason to suppose that he had even 
so much to do with Fortune by Land and Sea, 
published, in 1655, as by Heywood and Row- 
ley, or with The Thracian Wonder, attributed 
to Webster and Rowley by Kirkman in 
1661. There is little more probability in 
the same editor's attribution to the same 
writers of A Cure for a Cuckold, which he 
published in the same year. Kirkman's word 



236 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

is valueless as evidence, and there is nothing in 
the play of which we can say with much prob- 
ability that it is by either Webster or Rowley. 
Only the slow and thoughtful quality of some 
of the verse gives any real suggestion of Web- 
ster; and verse of Webster's kind is quite 
possible to imitate. The drearily comic prose 
is done after the pattern of the time, and there 
is nothing in it distinguishable from similar 
hack-work, whether done by Rowley or by 
others for the day's wage. 

In The Travels of the Three English Brothers, 
published in 1607, with a dedication signed 
"John Day, William Rowley, George Wilkins," 
it is easy, but not very profitable, to trace the 
share of Rowley. He probably put in Zaripha, 
the Shylock of the play, and wrote some of the 
more pompous blank verse and of the coarser 
verbal fooling. In The Maid in the Mill, 
licensed to Fletcher and Rowley 29 August, 
1623, and played at the Globe with Rowley 
as one of the actors, his share and Fletcher's 
are quite distinct, and they are divided 
no doubt, equally. Rowley's verse, by the 
side of the winged verse of Fletcher, seems 
somewhat crabbed and abstract, and the 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 237 

prose (interspersed with Fletcher's songs) 
somewhat cold and laboured. In The Witch 
of Edmonton, published in 1658 as "a Tragi- 
comedy by divers well-esteemed poets, William 
Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford, etc.," 
where Dekker and Ford are both equally 
evident, in their direction of the two main 
currents, the share of Rowley is difficult to 
make out, and could hardly have been con- 
siderable. There remains The Birth of Merlin 
which was published in 1662 as by Shakespeare 
and Rowley. Langbaine tells us that "William 
Rowley was not only beloved by those great 
men, Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson, but 
likewise writ, with the former, The Birth of 
Merlin^ The share of Shakespeare is not 
now in need of discussion; the play is crude 
and lumpish; it is stilted and monotonous in 
the verse, gross and tame in the prose. It 
would be pleasant to think that Rowley had 
no more to do with it than Shakespeare; but 
it is difficult to be positive in the matter after 
reading A Shoemaker a Gentleman. 

This incongruous and incoherent piece is a 
tragic farce, which has never been reprinted 
from the execrable first edition of 1638, where 



238 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

the printer, in his address to "the honest and 
high-spirited gentlemen of the never decaying 
art, called the gentle craft," admits with some 
honesty: ''I know it may come short of that 
accurateness both in plot and style that this 
witty age doth with greater curiosity require," 
yet excuses it, on the ground " that as plays 
were then, some twenty years ago, it was in 
the fashion." It is a sad jumble of cobblers, 
kings, " a wise virgin in Wales," and a Juliet's 
nurse; at one moment " an angel ascends out 
of the well and after descends again," at[another 
there is drinking of blood, and we hear in detail 
of tortures endured in war; the language varies 
from " Moulting tyrant, stop thy scandalous 
breath," used by quarreling kings, to " Clap- 
perdudgeon" and " Knipperdolin," flung as 
pet names by the cobbler at his wife. The few 
good lines which we come across at rare inter- 
vals are almost cruelly wasted; the farce which 
submerges them is a mere desperate attempt 
at comic realism. 

On the title-page of A New Wonder, Rowley 
is described as "one of his Majesty's Servants"; 
he is mentioned among the principal actors in 
The Maid in the Mill; in The Inner-Temple 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 239 

Masque he played Plumporridge; and, in the 
list of persons in AlVs Lost by Lust, we are 
told that Jaques, " a simple clownish gentle- 
man," was "personated by the poet." In the 
plays which he wrote in collaboration with 
Middleton, his hand has been most generally 
traced in the comic underplots, and sometimes 
as a disturbing element there, working for 
hardly more than the ears of the groundlings. 
In the low peasant's humour, earthy and 
almost animal, which he takes much trouble 
over in all these plays, sometimes making 
it really droll, always making it emphatic and 
telling, there seems to have been something 
which he really cared to do, perhaps because 
it was what he could represent best on the 
stage. In the tw^o chief plays which he wrote 
by himself he wove the comic prose not in- 
effectively into the more serious substance, 
but not only in A Shoemaker a Gentleman, but 
in most of the work done with Middleton, it 
stands out in sharp contrast. And this is 
the more curious, as we shall find unmis- 
takable signs of a very different kind of 
influence exercised by him upon precisely 
that serious si^stance. 



240 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

For it is not as a comic poet that Rowley- 
is most himself, or most admirable. Of his 
two remaining plays, one is a heroic tragedy 
and the other a pathetic domestic comedy, 
and we find in both, very differently exhibited, 
the same qualities of sincerity and nobility, 
often turning to uncouthness or exaggeration, 
but never, as in Middleton, losing the moral 
sense, the honesty of insight. The action in 
each is strained beyond probability, and in 
one becomes barbarous, in the other artificial; 
the verse follows the action, and halts, not only 
through the treasons of a more than usually 
treacherous printer. Yet, as the verse is but 
an emphasis upon profoundly felt speech, 
so the action rests always on a strong human 
foundation. 

In AlVs Lost by Lust (which deals with a 
subject made more famous by Landor in 
Count Julian) Rowley shows himself a poet 
by his comprehension of great passions, his 
sympathy with high moods, and by a sheer 
and naked speech, which can grasp filth or 
heroism in an equal grip. He has no measure, 
though sometimes constraint; no subtlety, 
though he will set consciences or clowns 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 241 

arguing in terms of strange pedantry; no 
sentiment, though he has all the violences of 
direct emotion; and he says what he wants 
to say and then stops. He has no ease or 
grace, and often labours to give point to his 
humour and weight to his serious utterances. 
The kind of verse that characterises him at 
his best is: 

Thy soul is a hired lackey towards hell, 

and he can sharpen it thus: 

Time's ancient bawd, opportunity, 
Attends us now, and yet our flaming blood 
Will scarce give leave to opportunity. 

Often he will go beyond the bounds of natural 
speech, not on a carrying imagination, but 
under the dragging weight of an emphasis 
which eloquence can do better without. In 
some of Blake's drawings of naked men with 
prodigious muscles, sweeping beards, and 
frantic eyes, the intense imitation of emotion 
has gone further than nature can lend help to. 
Just so does some of the tragic speech in Rowley 
falter through defects of mere force. " Rough 
Rowley, handling song with Esau's hand," 
as Swinburne has called him in a significant 



242 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

line, sets himself to construct imagery, and does 
it, sometimes with splendour, but a splendour 
prolonged to extinction. Thus he will develop 
a figure after this manner: 

We'll make so high to quench their silver moons 
And on their carcases an isthmus make 
To pass their straits again and forage them. 

Both in fun and earnest he plays on words, 
and is capable of writing " My heart's tri- 
angled," as Donne might have done, and 
distinguishing the number and position of the 
points. More often he does it in this wholly 
Elizabethan manner: 

My honoured friends, 

What we all thought to have borne home in triumph 

Must now be seen there in a funeral, 

Wrecked honour being chief mourner; here's the hearse 

Which we'll all follow. 

Even his " virgin martyrs," like Jacinta, who 
act nobly, are sometimes set talking with 
horrible detail, as, like Jacinta, they spit at 
their tormentors and wish 

that my tongue 
Were pointed with a fiery Pyramis 
To strike thee through. 

It is impossible for him to realise, even in his 
Dionysia, who dies with some of the ecstasy 



^ 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 243 

of Shakespeare's Cleopatra, that a woman 
can be lascivious and yet talk like a lady. His 
men can say memorable things, in which there 
is some of the passion of meditation, but, 
however well he knew " what kind of thing a 
man's heart" is, he did not know how to give 
continually adequate speech to those passions 
whose habitation there he was aware of. 

In A New Wonder, which takes place in 
London, and shows us the strange vehement 
passions, both petty and ardent, of business 
men, their small prides and large resolutions, 
we have a speech more easily on the level 
of the occasion, whether in this heightened 
way: 

Then be not angry, gentle sir, 

If now a string be touched, which hath too long 

Sounded so harshly over all the city; 

I now would wind it to a musical height; 

or whether the unrelenting father in prison 
repels his son with the direct cry: 

Ha! what art thou? Call for the keeper there, 
And thrust him out of doors or lock me up. 

Here, as elsewhere, the language is sometimes 
injured by emphasis, yet there is none of Mid- 
dleton's aim at point and cleverness, but a 



244 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

speech vividly and sometimes grossly natural, 
which sticks close to the matter. Its comedy 
is a kind of literalness, and its pathos is, too; 
and both are crammed with fine substance, 
thoughtful humour and thoughtful pity, with 
that simple acceptance and rendering of things 
as they are which Lamb noted in the play with 
much satisfaction. It is of this play that he 
says: "The old play-writers are distinguished 
by an honest boldness of exhibition, they 
show everything without being ashamed." 
Here, there is coarseness and there is clumsi- 
ness, but there is no flaw in the essential right- 
ness and reality of this whole contest in hearts, 
in which a natural human charity has its way 
with invincible softness. 

Now, if we begin to look for the influence of 
Rowley upon Middleton, we shall find it not 
so much in the set scenes of low comedy which 
he inserted among Middleton's verse, but in 
a new capacity for the rendering of great 
passions and a loftiness in good and evil which 
had never yet been found as an element in 
Middleton's brilliant and showy genius, and 
which hardly survives the end of his collabora- 
tion with Rowley. The whole range of sub- 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 243 

ject suddenly lifts, a new, more real and more 
romantic world (more real and more romantic 
because imagination rather than memory is 
at work) is seen upon the stage, and by some 
transformation, which could hardly have been 
mere natural growth, Middleton finds himself 
to be a poet. 

That Middleton learnt from Rowley, or 
did, with his help, more than either of them 
could do by himself, is evident for the first 
time clearly in A Fair Quarrel. The best 
part of the actual writing is not Rowley's. 
Middleton was a man of flexible mind, and we 
find in him everywhere a marvellous tact of 
matching his matter and manner. Never, in 
his wild comedies, does he bring in false 
heroics; he can keep on a due actual level 
beyond any dramatist of his time; and, when 
a great human moment comes to him, and has 
to be dealt with, he rises easily, and is no 
less adequate. He does not rise of himself, 
his material compels him, he is obedient to it, 
and, I cannot but think, awake to a fierier 
impulse like Rowley's. It is certain that Row- 
ley could not have written the two great Cap- 
tain Ager scenes as they stand; but I am 



/ 



246 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

equally certain that, with all his promptness 
of response to an emotion, Middleton could 
not have begun to render, at such a moral 
height, such an " absolute man," without some 
spiritual aid or life from Rowley. When 
there, when started, he drew his poetry, as he 
was wont to do, directly from his subject, 
and the natural emotion of it; and made a 
great scene where a weak one would have 
been contemptible. Can nature and poetry 
go further together, poetry hardly distinguish- 
able from the direct speech of nature, so 
warmed is it by human breath? Captain 
Ager's last words to his mother shine like fire 
and cut like steel, and are mere plain words 
with no more rhetoric in them than in this 
line which strikes straight: 

I never shall have need of honour more. 

In the scene of the duel, when all this fire is 
out in the man's soul, the tamer verses are not 
less absolute in their disheartened speech: 

What shall be done in such a worthless business 

But to be sorry, and to be forgiven; 

You, sir, to bring repentance, and I pardon? 

That the writing, in the two great scenes of 
Captain Ager, is Middleton's, and owes noth- 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 247 

ing in form, whatever it may owe in substance, 
to Rowley, can be proved beyond doubt by a 
mere reading over together of two speeches, 
one in this play, one in a play so wholly and 
characteristically Middleton's as A Chaste 
Maid in Cheapside: the speech of Captain 
Ager (ii. 1), which begins: 

Mine? think me not so miserable, 

and ends: 

Without which I'm ten fathoms under coward, 
That now am ten degrees above a man, 
Which is but one of virtue's easiest wonders; 

and the speech of Sir Walter (v. 1) which 
begins : 

death! is this 

A place for you to weep? 

and ends : 

this shows like 
The fruitless sorrow of a careless mother, 
That brings her son with dalliance to the gallows, 
And then stands by and weeps to see him suffer. 

The difference is all in the feeling; there is 
none in the phrasing. 

But that difference in the feeling! There is 
no indication, in anything which Middleton 



248 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

has so far written by himself, that he was 
capable of conceiving a character like Captain 
Ager, or of keeping such a character on a 
single level of high emotion. This Rowley 
could do, and I have no doubt that he was the 
" only begetter" of what he left to Middleton 
to develop. It is Rowley who writes the dedi- 
cation, and it is evident that he takes much of 
the credit of the play to himself. " You see, 
sir," he says, " I write as I speak, and I speak 
as I am, and that's excuse enough for me." 
His share in the actual writing is, indeed, 
almost too evident; there is cold, pedantic, 
sour and crabbed prose, aping comedy, and, 
in the scene between Jane and the physician, 
a hard, reasoning kind of serious verse which 
jars singularly on the rich and copious verse 
of Middleton, in the finer parts of the play. 
Some of the worst of the mechanical fooling 
in prose was added in a second edition, and 
(the public being much the same in all ages) 
it was probably added because the original 
sample had given much satisfaction to the 
public. Rowley worked for hire, and this is 
some of his hired work. 
It was not long after the time of A Fair 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 249 

Quarrel that Middleton and Rowley collabo- 
rated together in the admirable and enter- 
taining masque, The World tost at Tennis, 
For the most part, Middleton's masques are 
tame and tedious, without originality in the 
invention or lyrical quality in the songs. In 
one only. The Inner Temple Masque, is there 
any natural gaiety, any real quaintness or 
humour; and, as we find Rowley's name 
among the actors, in the humorous peasant 
part of Plumporridge, may it not be con- 
jectured that Rowley had some share in the 
writing? His heavy tread is as distinctly 
heard through all the opening part of The 
World tost at Tennis, as Middleton's new voice 
is heard in the later part. Middleton rarely 
wrote a lovelier succession of cadences than in 
these lines spoken by Deceit to Simplicity: 

The world, sweetheart, is full of cares and troubles, 

No match for thee; thou art a tender thing, 

A harmless, quiet thing, a gentle fool, 

Fit for the fellowship of ewes and rams; 

Go, take thine ease and pipe; give me the burden, 

The clog, the torment, the heart-break, the world: 

Here's for thee, lamb, a dainty oaten pipe. 

And there is suavity, swiftness and a quaint 
fantastic colouring in the verse chattered 



250 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

against hypocrites and puritans by the Five 
Starches. 

It was probably about the time, when he was 
engaged on his masques, that Middleton wrote 
The Witch, and this may well have been his 
first attempt at a purely romantic play. The 
versification is done with astonishing ease, 
in long, loose, rapid lines; and, in the witches' 
Bongs, there is not only a ghastly fancy awake, 
but something nearer to a fine lyric cadence 
than he ever got before or since. It is through 
the interpolation, as it obviously was, of 
some of these lines in the very imperfect text 
of Macbeth, that a play in which the main action 
is almost a parody of the romantic drama 
has come to be looked upon as one of Middle- 
ton's chief works. The mere writing through- 
out is good, but the easy eloquent dialogue 
covers no more than the gaps and deformations 
of the main outline. The witches bring a 
new element into Middleton's work, a wild 
fancy, of which he had shown hardly a trace; 
in the rest of the play he does but practise 
in the romantic manner. They stand in some 
dim middle air, between the old vile pitiable 
crone of Dekker in The Witch of Edmonton, 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 251 

who is dreadfully human, and the " crowded 
empress of the nether clefts of hell" in Macbeth, 
who shares no resemblance with the other 
Hecate but in her name, and who is more 
dreadful because she is not human. But 
Lamb has said finally all that need be said 
on these fundamental differences. 

After the experiment of The Witch, Middle- 
ton seems to have returned to his collaboration 
with Rowley, and it is to about this time that 
we must assign the play by which both are now 
chiefly remembered, the tragedy of The Change- 
ling. It is Rowley who begins the play, and 
thus introduces and characterises both Bianca 
and De Flores. The germ of both is there, 
and the rest of the play is but its growth. 
But, even in this opening, there are distinct 
though slight traces of Middleton, as if the 
collaboration had begun already. IMiddleton 
takes up the thread in the second act, and has 
both hands upon it in the third, though at 
the end of the great scene Rowley seems to 
snatch the whole web out of his hands and 
to twist it into an abrupt end. In all this 
part, mainly written by Middleton, there is a 
restraint never paralleled elsewhere in his 



252 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

work; nowhere else are words used with such 
fruitful frugality, or so much said in so little. 
And this bareness, this fierce reticence, lead 
up, with a stealthy directness, to that out- 
break of evil joy when De Flores cries: 

this act 

Has put me into spirit! 

and the modest murderess answers in aston- 
ishment : 

Why, 'tis impossible thou canst be so wicked 

Or shelter such a cunning cruelty 

To make his death the murderer of my honour! 

The whole scene is written in words of white 
heat; Middleton has distilled into it the essence 
of his own genius and of the genius of Rowley; 
it is, in Leigh Hunt's famous and revealing 
words of De Flores, " at once tragical, probable, 
and poetical" beyond almost any single scene 
in the Elizabethan drama; a scene unlike 
anything in Shakespeare, but comparable, 
not as poetry but as drama with Shakespeare. 
And it is on the level of this great scene that 
the play ends, in a splendid horror, and it is 
Rowley who ends as he began the dreadful 
lives of De Flores and of Beatrice. Rowley's 
underplot and some of Middleton's inter- 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 253 

mediate action do what they can to deform a 
play which, but for them, would be a noble 
and complete masterpiece. Yet the single 
impression left upon our minds is scarcely 
affected by them. The play is De Flores, 
and De Flores seems to greaten as he passes 
from one to the other of the two playwrights, 
as they collaborate visibly at his creation. 
In this great creation is the first result and 
justification of Middleton and Rowley's work 
in common; for it is certain that De Flores 
as he is would never have been possible to 
either Rowley or Middleton. 

The Spanish Gipsy is generally put down 
almost as a whole to Middleton, and even 
Swinburne refuses to see the hand of Rowley 
in " the more high-toned passages." I am 
inclined to think that Rowley wrote a larger 
part of the play than Middleton, and not by 
any means only the gipsy scenes, with their 
jollity, dancing and crabbed ballad singing. 
The opening was, no doubt, actually written 
by Middleton, but it has a quality unusual 
in his work, and not unusual in the work 
of Rowley. It is as if Rowley were behind 
Middleton, controlling him. Most of the 



254 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

prose, both when it goes creeping and tedious 
with Sancho and Soto, and when it over- 
flows into doggrel and occasionally savoury 
snatches of song, has Rowley's manner and 
substance; but he is to be traced, also, in 
the slow and powerful verse which ends the 
third act, in lines like: 

This is the triumph of a soul drowned deep 
In the unfathomed seas of matchless sorrow, 

and in the whole attitude and speech of a father 
who speaks with the very accent of Julianus 
in All's Lost by Lust: 

Teach me how I may now be just and cruel, 
For henceforth I am childless. 

Rowley is heard, also, through much of the 
fourth act, though Middleton comes in un- 
mistakably towards the end, and is the writer 
of the whole fifth act. The characters are 
distributed between them, and so charming a 
person as Constanza is decidedly at her best 
when she speaks through Middleton. The 
whole play is not made very probable, or meant 
to be so; it is a frank romance, with stage 
mysteries, some of them thrilling, like the 
wonderful opening scene, some, mere tricks 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 255 

of convenience; and there is a freshness and 
pleasantness about it which seem to show 
us Middleton in full and final acceptance of 
the romantic manner. 

Yet it is difficult to assign to any other period 
the comedy of Anything for a Quiet Life, 
printed in 1662, and so badly printed that it 
is not easy to distinguish the prose from the 
verse, the more so as the one seems to be set 
to run in no very different measures from the 
other. It seems to be a late and only return 
to the earlier manner of the farcical comediee 
of city life, with shop-keeping scenes of the 
old random brilliance and the old domestic 
fooleries and reinstallments. Even more mat- 
ter is crammed into it, even more hastily, and 
there is the old fierce vigour of talk. But in 
two plays, published together in 1657, we 
see what seems to be almost the last mood of 
Middleton, after his collaboration with Rowley 
was at an end, and the influence perhaps not 
wholly evaporated. More Dissemblers besides 
Women, which is characteristic of Middleton 
in its tangle of virtues and hypocrisies, its 
masquerade of serious meanings and humour- 
ous disguises, is written in verse of a lovely 



256 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

and eager quality, which bends with equal 
flexibility to the doings of " those dear gipsies" 
and to the good cardinal's concerns of con- 
science " in a creature that's so doubtful as a 
woman." It is a parti-coloured thing, and has 
beauty and oddity. But in Women beware 
Women we find much of Middleton's finest 
and ripest work, together with his most rancid 
" comic relief"; a stern and pitiless " criticism 
of life" is interrupted by foul and foolish 
clowning; and a tragedy of the finest comic 
savour ends in a mere heap of corpses, where 

vengeance met vengeance 
Like a set match, as if the plagues of sin 
Had been agreed to meet here all together. 

"I've lost myself in this quite" Middleton 
might say with the duke, and rarely has better 
material been more callously left to spoil. 
There is no finer comedy of its kind in the whole 
of Elizabethan drama than the scene between 
Livia, Bianca and the widow; and the kind is a 
rare, bitter and partly tragic one. The human 
casuistry is flawless; the irony is an illumina- 
tion rather than a correction of reality. And 
these vile people are alive, and the vices in 
them work with a bewildering and convincing 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 257 

certainty. The technique of such scenes aa 
that in which husband and wife flaunt their 
new finery at each other is not less than 
astonishing. All the meaner passions are 
seen in probable action, speaking without 
emphasis, in a language never too far from 
daily speech for the complete illusion of reality. 
There is not even the interruption of a mere 
splendour, no one speaks greatly or utters irrel- 
evant poetry; here, poetry is the very slave 
and confidant of drama, heroically obedient. 
But the heights of The Changeling, the nobility 
of even what was evil in the passions of that 
play, are no longer attained. Middleton, 
left to himself, has returned, with new experi- 
ence and new capacity, to his own level. 

With one more experiment, and this a 
master-piece of a wholly new kind, " the only 
work of English poetry," says Swinburne, 
" which may properly be called Aristophanic," 
the career of Middleton comes, as far as we 
know, to an end. A Game of Chess is a satire, 
taking the popular side against Spain, and it 
was the Spanish ambassador Gondomar, the 
" Machiavel-politician " and Black Knight of 
its chess-board, who caused the suppression 



258 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

of the play, and the punishment of all con- 
cerned in it. It is the most perfect of Middle- 
ton's works, and it carries some of his most 
intimate qualities to a point they had not 
reached before. Banter turns to a quite 
serious and clear and bitter satire; burlesque 
becomes a severe and elegant thing; the verse, 
beginning formally and always kept well within 
bounds, is fitted with supreme technical skill 
to this new, outlandish matter; there are 
straight confessions of sins and symbolic feasts 
of the vices, in which a manner learnt for the 
numbering of the feasts and fastings of the 
city finds itself ready for finer use. We learn 
now how 

fat cathedral bodies 
Have very often but lean little soul, 

and the imagery, already expressive, takes on 
a new colour of solemn mockery. 

From this Leviathan-scandal that lies rolling 
Upon the crystal waters of devotion, 

is sometimes the language of the Black Knight, 
and sometimes: 

In the most fortunate angle of the world 
The court hath held the city by the horns 
Whilst I have milked her. 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 259 

Technique, in drama and verse alike, never 
flags; and the play is a satire and criticism, 
no longer of city manners or of personal 
vices, but of the nations' policy; and that it 
was accepted as such, by the public and by the 
government of the time, is proved by the 
fifteen hundred pounds taken by the actors 
in nine days, and by the arrest of Middleton 
for what was really a form of patriotism. 

We have no record of anything written by 
Middleton during the three remaining years of 
his hfe. A Game of Chess is the culmination 
of those qualities which seem to have been 
most natural and instinctive in him, in spite 
of the splendid work of another kind which he 
did with Rowley in The Changeling. His 
genius was varied and copious, and he showed 
his capacity to do almost every kind of 
dramatic work with immense vigour. Life is 
never long absent from these tangled scenes, 
in which so heterogeneous a crowd hurries 
by, not stopping long enough to make us 
familiar with most of the persons in it, but 
giving us an unmistakable human savour. 
Few of the plays are quite satisfactory all 
through; there is almost always some con- 



260 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

eiderable flaw, in construction, in characterisa- 
tion, or in aesthetic taste; yet hardly one 
of them can be neglected in our consideration 
of the work as a whole. In single scenes of 
tragedy and of comedy (romantic comedy, 
the comedy of manners, farce and satire) he 
can hold his own against any contemporary 
and it is only in lyric verse that he is never 
successful. He became a remarkable dramatic 
poet, but he was not born to sing. Poetry 
came to him slowly, and he had to disentangle 
it from more active growths of comic energy. 
It came to him when he began to realise that 
there was something in the world besides 
cheating shop-keepers and cozening lawyers, 
and the bargains made between men and 
women for bodies, not souls. With the height- 
ening of emotions his style heightens, and as 
his comedy refines itself his verse becomes 
subtler. The cry of De Flores: 

Ha! what art thou that tak'st away the light 
Betwixt that star and me? I dread thee not: 
'Twas but a mist of conscience; 

is almost unique in imagination in his work. 
And it is drama even more than it is poetry. 
His style is the most plausible of all styles 



MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 261 

in poetry, and it has a probable beauty, 
giving an easy grace of form to whatever 
asks to be expressed. It rarely steps aside 
to pick up a jewel, nor do jewels drop naturally 
out of its mouth. 

1907. 



THE END 



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